Oxford Brookes Centre for Health, Medicine and Society Podcasts

History of Medicine #25: Race – a history of a bad idea

In this seminar Gayle Davis shifts the conceptual framework from characterizations of pregnant women and motherhood more widely to those of women whose pregnancy aspirations required medical assistance, and the degree to which their desire for children was pathologised by medical professionals in postwar Britain. Offering a remarkable insight into the longevity of eugenic paradigms with regards to selecting donors for artificial insemination procedures, and the social perception thereof, the seminar also critically investigates the Feversham Committee of the 1950s and the context informing the often critical views of practitioners questioning the motives of both the would-be mother and would-be donor father. This seminar took place at Oxford Brookes University on 11 December 2012.

History of Medicine #24: Suitable for Parenthood: The Eugenics of Reproductive Health in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain

In this seminar Florence Binard explores the dichotomy of ‘eugenic feminists’ in contrast to ‘feminist eugenics’ by focusing primarily on authors of the former group that understood themselves as both feminists as well as eugenicists. Binard critically investigates the works of Edith Ellis, Mary Sharlieb, Frances Swiney, Elizabeth Sloan Chester, and Caleb Saleeby towards illuminating the extent to which debates on reproduction and feminism related to the social construction of childless women and changing perceptions of their wider societal functions. This seminar took place at Oxford Brookes University on 27 November 2012.

History of Medicine #23: Spinsters and Lesbians as Spiritual Mothers of the British Race

In this seminar Lesley Hall investigates the relationship between feminism and eugenics through the fascinating lens of Naomi Mitchison’s fiction. JBS Haldane’s sister, and very much situated at the centre of the eugenic and literary movements of her time, Naomi Mitchison was a prolific author writing path braking historical fiction amongst other works before turning to Science Fiction. Scrutinizing her personal and political lives, this seminar focuses on three of Mitchison’s postwar works in relation to perceptions of breeding and reproduction, namely Memoirs of a Spacewomen (1962), Solution 3 (1975), and Not by Bread Alone (1983). This seminar took place at Oxford Brookes University on 13 November 2012.

History of Medicine #22: Send in the Clones? Naomi Mitchison (née Haldane)’s Musing on Reproduction, Breeding, Feminism, Socialism and Eugenics from the 1920s to the 1970s

This seminar offers a particularly insightful, and far ranging investigation of German eugenics before the Nazi rise to power and in its aftermath, focusing on the regime’s various policies to promote professed ‘valuable’ offspring on the one hand, and strategies to prevent and eliminate those deemed undesirable on the other by means of sterilization and euthanasia. This seminar took place at Oxford Brookes University on 30 October 2012

History of Medicine #21: Women, the Family and Eugenics in Nazi Germany

In the larger context of arguing for recasting the twentieth century as ‘the century of woman’, this seminar seeks to highlight the role eugenics played in relationship to maternalism as an example of women’s integration in state making and modernization policies. This seminar took place at Oxford Brookes University on 16 October 2012

History of Medicine #20: Eugenics and Maternalism during the Century of Woman: Trends in Eastern Europe

This seminar addresses the main theme of the lecture series on eugenics and maternal and child health by exploring the issue of ‘maternalism’ within the framework of the feminist and marxist historiography which gave rise to this field of enquiry in the first place. And it explores the topic within the context of Italian fascism’s contradictory attempts in the 1920s and 1930s both to increase the ‘quantity’ (numbers) and improve the ‘quality’ (biology) of the Italian ‘race’. This seminar took place at Oxford Brookes University on 2 October 2012

History of Medicine #19: Eugeni-fascist Vitalism, Racial Prepotency, and Maternal Health in Interwar Italy

This seminar’s main objective is to provide an overview of Spanish toxicology in the nineteenth-century and analyzes aspects such as the formation of a community of Spanish toxicologists and the changes produced in toxicology as a discipline. The study also discusses questions relating to the numerous definitions given for ‘poison’, and the difficulties in establishing an agreement between the scientific and legal terms, with a particular focus on an alleged poisoning case that took place in 1844. The debates that arose in these judicial processes point to the difficulties that nineteenth-century toxicologist had to face but that also laid the foundations of toxicology. This seminar took place at Oxford Brookes University on 24 April 2012

History of Medicine #18: Making experts in the periphery: Toxicology in nineteenth-century Spain

In this Seminar, Georgia Buttina Watson offers a range of remarkable insights into how urban planning and regeneration can dramatically affect not only the local population‘s sense of self, a geographic and collective identity, but also the wider impact living condition have upon the communities' physical and mental health. A richly illustrated seminar, it investigated, amongst others, Boston’s ‘Big Dig’ redevelopment alongside her own projects such as that in Angeltown and those currently underway in Oxford. This seminar took place at Oxford Brookes University on 17 April 2012

History of Medicine #17: Place Identity and Healthy Cities

This seminar offers a fascinating and wideranging discussion of the history of morphological evolution conceptually a nd empirically, with a marked emphasis on scientific methodologies and the extent to which genetic manipulation can alter the shape and appearance of specimens – such as the Drosophila mutant with legs for antenna. This seminar took place at Oxford Brookes University on 27 March 2012

History of Medicine #16: A History of Morphological Evolution: From Darwin to Lewis and beyond

This seminar examines the development of the pharmaceutical industry in the second half of the twentieth century, with a particular focus on the USA and Europe, the main centres of the large corporations and their largest markets. It analyses their growth and how they met the challenge of the evolving biotechnology industry, in the context of spiralling research and development costs, government pressures on drug prices and greater regulation. The growth of very large international or ‘global’ corporations has taken place across many industries and been defined in different ways. The paper concludes with an assessment of the extent of ‘globalisation’ in the pharmaceutical industry. This seminar took place at Oxford Brookes University on 13 March 2012

History of Medicine #15: International or global?: The pharmaceutical industry 1950–2010

This seminar on ‘From Deficiency to Difficulty’ captures an historical journey made by people with learning difficulties from the objects to potential subjects of the construction of their social identities. The seminar discusses three historical phases of these constructions, from a formalisation of a condition called ‘mental deficiency’ following the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act; to the period of the entrenchment of their segregation in the inter-war years; and finally to the slow growth of self-determination following World War Two. The seminar focuses on relationships with employment experienced by people with learning difficulties as a way of navigating through the extended historical period. Employment has been considered as irrelevant to the lives of people with learning difficulties by what Dan Goodley has called the ‘naturalised views’ or the ‘common sense’ of learning difficulty identities. The seminar shows that far from being irrelevant, their relationship to the labour market is central to understanding how their identities have been developed. This seminar took place at Oxford Brookes University on 7 Februay 2012

History of Medicine #14: From Deficiency to Difficulty: Three historical phases of constructing learning disability since 1913

In this seminar Paul Weindling, Director of Brookes’ Centre for Health, Medicine and Society, discusses the ever-changing and evolving roles of historians of medicine as seen through the prism of his work on medical research and experimentation conducted by the Third Reich. In particular, Paul detailed the various ethical pitfalls surrounding the use of data gathered under such circumstances, as well as the emotive debates surrounding the naming and memorialising of the individual victims and their specific life histories. This seminar took place at Oxford Brookes University on 6 December 2011

History of Medicine #13: Medical Experiments

In this seminar Claudia Stein, Director of the Centre for the History of Medicine at the University of Warwick, offers her fascinating insights into the life and work of Karl Sudhoff and his lasting import on the establishment of the history of medicine as an academic field along with that of his successor Karl Sigerist. The seminar also detailed the seminal but often neglected 1911 International Hygiene Exhibit in Dresden organised by Karl Lingner, discussing its relevance as a microcosm of the various perceptions of, and approaches to, public health and medicine. This seminar took place at Oxford Brookes University

History of Medicine #12: Karl Sudhoff

The Doctor by Luke Fildes, first exhibited over a century ago, is a popular masterpiece and an icon of medical art. The artist was inspired by the devoted care of a doctor who looked after his young son during a fatal illness some years before. The presentation will explore the historical context of the scene portrayed: an imposing male doctor observes the ‘crisis’ of a child’s illness as dawn breaks in a humble cottage. Consideration will be given to: The artist: a Victorian success story; How the picture was commissioned and painted; Whether the scene portrays myth or reality including consideration of: The child: her likely illness and prognosis, The family: social circumstances and access to medical care, The physician: his training, employment circumstances and clinical methods. Did he arrive by horse, carriage, bicycle or even motor car?, The treatment: the possible contents of the medicine bottle and their efficacy. The picture in the context of other portrayals of doctors and children. This seminar took place at Oxford Brookes University on 1 November 2011

History of Medicine #11: The Doctor by Luke Fildes (1891)

Podcasts about the History of Medicine. Can the history of epidemics or the history of body fat help us better understand our susceptibility to illnesses like swine flu or provide a clue to the modern day rise of obesity?

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Oxford Brookes Centre for Health, Medicine and Society Podca...

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