Themes > medicine

Alison Moulds has been awarded the Greta Depledge Prize for the best postgraduate paper by the Victorian Popular Fiction Association at their 8th annual conference.

Alison Moulds has written a piece for the British Medical Journal‘s Medical Humanities blog entitled Embarrassing Bodies: The male doctor/female patient encounter.

In browsing many natural history periodicals of the nineteenth century, a casual reader could be forgiven for believing that science was pursued predominantly by men.

When I talk about my research on Victorian medical women, I find that people are sometimes familiar with the names of the earliest pioneers, such as Elizabeth Blackwell, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, and Sophia Jex-Blake.

Frederick James Gant first appeared on my research radar when I was examining attitudes towards women in medicine.

During my thesis, one of my major research interests was medical men and women who produced literature. While some of these authors (such as Arthur Conan Doyle and W. Somerset Maugham) remain well-known today, others have faded into obscurity.

In 1941, the British Medical Journal celebrated the 75th anniversary of the Indian Medical Gazette. Launched in 1866, the Gazette was by this point the longest-running medical journal on the subcontinent.

My last blog post profiled the Indian Medical Gazette, a long-running journal affiliated with the Indian Medical Service (IMS). This week I’m looking at one of its major rivals, the Indian Medical Record, which proudly proclaimed its independence from the

My last blog post looked at the Indian Medical Record, a journal aimed at independent practitioners in British India.

An article by Dr Sally Frampton and Professor Roger Kneebone on the history of keyhole surgery has been published in Social History of Medicine.

I first encountered Jukes de Styrap as the author of The Young Practitioner (1890) – an advice guide for aspiring medical men – when I was researching the early struggles in practice.

In an earlier blog post, I profiled the Midland Medical Miscellany, a proudly provincial medical journal which was conducted by Kenneth William Millican.

In 1893, the popular periodical The Nineteenth Century featured an article on ‘Medical Women in Fiction’, written by Sophia Jex-Blake, who was well-known as a pioneer in the movement for women in medicine.

One of the pleasures of working with a physical collection of journals is serendipity.

On 7 May 2016, Constructing Scientific Communities held a one-day symposium on “People Powered Medicine” at the Royal College of Surgeons of England in London. We are pleased to announce that videos from the day are now available.

ConSciCom team member Alison Moulds discusses the medical humanities symposium she co-organised earlier this year.

A new episode of The Conversationalist podcast is available today! In this episode, Dr Sally Frampton (ConSciCom, University of Oxford) and Dr Oskar Cox Jenson (Queen Mary University of London) discuss vaccination and the anti-vax movement in the 19thc.

The Doctor – later styled as The New Doctor – was a general medical weekly aimed at lay readers.

The readers of the Lancet were only too familiar with the ubiquity of the “medical-women question”, for it confronted them not only in their institutions and through popular culture, but in the pages of their medical journals as well.

The Medical Mirror was a general medical monthly, published in London. It was originally edited by metropolitan physician William Abbotts Smith.

The workshop ‘Working with 19th-Century Medical and Health Periodicals’ was held on 30 May 2015 and co-organized by the ERC-funded ‘Diseases of Modern Life’ Project and the AHRC-funded ‘Constructing Scientific Communities’ Project.

With the rise of the ‘Impact’ agenda in contemporary Britain, and the requirement that researchers show how their work has influenced a wider public, a new breed of expert has sprung up -- the writer of “impact case studies”.

In 1958, the endocrinologist Richard Asher wrote a provocative article for the British Medical Journal lamenting the lacklustre and boring style of the modern medical journal.

Back in May Constructing Scientific Communities organised an evening event at the Royal College of Surgeons’ Hunterian Museum to help celebrate the opening of our exhibition there, Vaccination: Medicine and the Masses.

The release of The Man Who Invented Christmas (2017) – a film which tells the story of how Charles Dickens penned A Christmas Carol in 1843 – has reignited the popular myth that the Victorians ‘created’ the festive season.