History of Medicine, Science, and Technology » News (tag [Publication])

‘Never in Asylum Before’: Childbirth, Insanity and Jewish Mothers in Colney Hatch Asylum c.1900

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 11:08:00 GMT

We’re delighted to share that Hilary has recently published an article in Social History of Medicine. This is an outcome of her Wellcome Investigator Award held at Warwick between 2021 and 2025, which explored postnatal mental disorders in twentieth-century Britain along with postdoctoral fellows, Kelly-Ann Couzens and Fabiola Creed. This has appeared as an advanced Open Access article and will be part of a special issue on Women, Reproduction and Mental Illness, scheduled to appear later this year.

This article explores the admission of Jewish women diagnosed with mental disorders related to pregnancy and childbearing into Colney Hatch Asylum around 1900. Admissions with puerperal insanity were prevalent amongst ‘Hebrew’ women, and in published work, including that of the institution’s medical officers, this was related to assumptions about marital and sexual practices, heredity and the ‘neurotic’ tendencies of Jewish people. However, analysis of the asylum’s casebooks reveals discrepancies between these explanations and those drawn on in practice. Similarly to other women admitted with disorders associated with childbearing, the mental breakdown of Jewish women was largely attributed to domestic stress and the strains of childbirth. The article also explores the testimonies of family members whose comments were incorporated into the asylum records, suggesting that these provide valuable insights into families’ understanding of the role of childbirth in prompting mental breakdown, reinforcing institutional diagnoses or at times diverging from them.

Please access here : https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkaf098

Protecting Health and the Catholic Family: Catholic Women’s League and Preventive Medicine Clinics for Mothers and Infants in Belgium (1945–1975)

Fri, 02 May 2025 09:33:00 GMT

We’re delighted to share that Juliette, 'a visiting fellow to the Centre for the History of Medicine, has recently published an article in Social History of Medicine. The article, which she began writing during her time at Warwick and presented to colleagues at CHM, marks a significant achievement in her research journey.

We’re delighted to share that Juliette, a former Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the History of Medicine, has recently published an article in Social History of Medicine. The article, which she began developing during her time at Warwick and presented to colleagues at CHM, marks a significant milestone in her research.

Since July 2023, she has been engaged as a postdoctoral researcher on the BRAIN WomenExile project (BELSPO), in collaboration with Université libre de Bruxelles, the University of Antwerp, and the Belgian State Archives. From November, she will continue her work in Paris as part of a two-year Marie Curie Fellowship. We’re proud to have supported her during her time at Warwick and wish her every success in this exciting next chapter.

Summary

This article examines a twofold specificity in circumstances that were brought about by the intervention of the Catholic Women’s League in the Belgian mother and infant welfare system between 1945 and 1975: the importance of religion and the central role of women volunteers in state-funded medical-social facilities. For the Women’s League, the infant clinics were a means of defending Catholic positions on the family and birth control on the ground, and of asserting its legitimacy to intervene in child protection policies. After 1945, the women who volunteered in the clinics took on apostolic missions, but also contributed to the medicalisation of children’s education. Protected by the Women’s League, they occupied rather unusual positions of authority. This article explores how the League succeeded in maintaining the presence of volunteers by creating new social services and missions when the medical and religious missions of clinics were changing in the early 1960s.

"Low Risk Doesn't Mean No Risk": The Making of Lesbian Safer-Sex and the Creation of New (S)experts in the Late Twentieth Century

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 11:19:31 GMT

We are happy to announce that 'The Cultural History of the NHS' project continues to bear fruit!

Dr Hannah Elizabeth, one of our postdoctoral Fellows, has just published their chapter, '“Low Risk Doesn’t Mean No Risk”: The Making of Lesbian Safer-Sex and the Creation of New (S)experts in the Late Twentieth Century' (open access here), an exciting piece of work informed by and begun during their time with us here at CHM!

Dr Elizabeth is now a Fellow on Dr Rebecca Wright's fantastic Wellcome Trust funded Project Carbon Bodies: Warmth and Fuelling Health in Britain, 1918 to 2022 at the University of Northumbria.

The Mizo Discovery of the British Raj: Empire and Religion in Northeast India, 1890-1920

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 10:36:26 GMT

Congratulations to former CHM PhD student, Dr Kyle Jackson (2017), whose amazing doctoral dissertation (supervised by David Hardiman and Roberta Bivins) has just been published by Cambridge University Press. Order a copy here

Another great read for the CHM shelves!

Improving Maternity Care through Women’s Voices: The Women’s Health Strategy Continues a Long Process of Advocacy

Thu, 16 Feb 2023 10:15:00 GMT

Congratulations to Dr Fabiola Creed and Professor Hilary Marland for the publication of their policy paper in the online journal History & Policy.

The article explores the role of women’s voices in shaping maternity care during the twentieth century and you can read it in full here.

Executive Summary

Effective maternity care has been hampered by limited service provision and inadequate funding throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century.
Pronatalist policies dominated maternity care in the first half of the twentieth century, moving to a growing consumer-led emphasis in the post-war period.
Historical events – war, the creation of the National Health Service, the hospitalisation and medicalisation of childbirth, and the feminist health movement – led to fundamental changes in maternity services and care.
After 1900, women became vocal in expressing their aims for improved maternity care, and their ambitions were most effective when they dovetailed with pronatalist goals.
Following the expansion of mass media, education, and employment for women since the 1960s, both women’s organisations and individuals developed greater confidence in their campaigns for change and in urging policy makers and health services to listen.
Descriptions of their own experiences from women of all social circumstances and ethnicities can be converted into powerful tools for lobbying policy makers and government and for raising recognition of postnatal mental illness.

Pilot Programs and Postcolonial Pivots: Pioneering “DNA Fingerprinting” on Britain’s Borders

Thu, 19 Jan 2023 12:01:07 GMT

Professor Roberta Bivins, CHM Director, has had an article published in Contemporary Studies in Society and History.

Pilot Programs and Postcolonial Pivots: Pioneering 'DNA Fingerprinting' on Britain Borders

Developed in Britain and the United States in the 1980s, genetic profiling has since become a global technology. Today, it is widely regarded as the evidentiary “gold standard” in individual and forensic identification. However, its origins as a technology of post-empire at Britain’s externalized borders in South Asia have remained unexamined. This article will argue that the first state-sanctioned use of “DNA fingerprints,” a pilot program exploring its value in disputed cases of family reunification migration from Bangladesh and Pakistan to Britain’s postcolonial cities, repays closer examination. National and transnational responses to the advent of genetic profiling as an identification technology demonstrate the interplay between imperial and postcolonial models and networks of power and truth production. At the same time, this experiment prefigured and conditioned the wider reception of DNA profiling in matters of kinship. Far from being a footnote, the use of genetic profiling by migrants determined to exercise their legal rights in the face of a hostile state also worked to naturalize genetic ties as the markers of “true” familial relationships.

The World Bank’s Advocacy of User Fees in Global Health, c.1970–1997: More Ideology than Evidence?

Thu, 19 Jan 2023 11:51:00 GMT

Dr Chris Sirrs, CHM postdoctoral researcher, has had a chapter he has written with Martin Gorsky at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, published in the latest volume of the Yearbook for the History of Global Development.

This is based partly on research he undertook at the World Bank archives in Washington DC and interviews with former Bank staff and explores the rationale behind the Bank’s controversial promotion of user fees for health services from the 1980s. The chapter is published open access.

Full citation: Martin Gorsky and Christopher Sirrs, ‘The World Bank’s Advocacy of User Fees in Global Health, c.1970–1997: More Ideology than Evidence?’, in Health and Development, ed. Iris Borowy and Bernard Harris, Yearbook for the History of Global Development 2 (De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2023), 277–316, https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111015583-011/html

Taking Action Against Medical Accidents

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 14:12:00 GMT

Congratulations to Dr Chris Sirrs, CHM Research Fellow, who has had an article published in the Journal of Patient Safety and Risk Assessment

Christopher Sirrs, ‘Taking Action against Medical Accidents: A Brief History of AvMA and Clinical Risk Management in the NHS’, Journal of Patient Safety and Risk Management, 30 October 2022, https://doi.org/10.1177/25160435221135120.

Abstract

Established in 1982, Action against Medical Accidents (AvMA)—originally named Action for Victims of Medical Accidents—was effectively the first charity in Britain dedicated to ‘patient safety’. This article provides a historical analysis of the origins and work of AvMA, situating its background in the medical negligence ‘crisis’ of the 1970s and 1980s, growing consumerism in healthcare, and the significant barriers to justice patients confronted following a clinical incident. It also explores AvMA's impacts on evolving attitudes towards patient harm and safety in the NHS. The article asserts that in addition to supporting patients and campaigning for changes in legal procedures, AvMA played an instrumental role in raising the political profile of adverse health events (‘medical accidents’). By supporting claimant solicitors and increasing their chances of legal success, AvMA contributed to the rising tide of negligence claims, which incentivised NHS trusts and health authorities to introduce clinical risk management (CRM). By 2000, CRM was being framed as part of a broader mission to improve quality and safety in healthcare, and AvMA was recognised as a key stakeholder in the new patient safety agenda

New Publication: Posters, Protests and Prescriptions

Thu, 23 Jun 2022 11:56:49 GMT

Exciting news this month sees the Manchester University Press publication of Posters, Protests and Prescriptions, a collection of essays in relation to the Centre’s Cultural History of the NHS project, edited by former CHM members and researchers on this project Jenny Crane and Jane Hand.

And more good news is that this book is available through open access due to the support of the Wellcome Trust.

Dr Jenny Crane's monograph on Child Protection published

Mon, 29 Oct 2018 12:16:00 GMT

Dr Jenny Crane, Wellcome Trust Research Fellow on the Cultural History of the NHS project, has had her monograph published by Palgrave MacMillan.

Child Protection in England, 1960–2000 Expertise, Experience, and Emotion is based on her doctorate research, carried out at Warwick.