Imperial Bodies in London: Empire, Mobility, and the Making of British Medicine, 1880-1914
My first book will be published with University of Pittsburgh press in autumn 2021. Following mobile tropical bodies, this book challenges the idea of a uniquely domestic medical practice, arguing instead that British medicine was imperial medicine in the late Victorian era. Using the analytic tools of geography, she interrogates sites of encounter across the imperial metropolis to explore how medical research and practice were transformed and remade at the crossroads of empire.
Visceral Consciousness: The Gut-Brain Axis in Sleep and Sleeplessness in Britain and America, 1850-1914
A research article for the Bulletin of the History of Medicine exploring how the gut was seen as both a cause of and a potential cure for insomnia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Clinical images, imperial power and Bhau Daji’s secret cure for leprosy
An original research article co-authored by Martha Biggins to be published in the Science Museum Group Journal in spring 2021.
Speed of Science
A blog contributed to the Times of COVID-19 hosted by the Lifetimes project of the University of Oslo.
In Praise of Touching
Why is working with museum objects so appealing to researchers? There can be little doubt that object-centred research has been coveted by academics and curators alike since at least the nineteenth century. A wealth of scholarly work has interrogated the museum object from philosophical, historical and sociological perspectives. You might justifiably think already we know everything there is to know about how to engage with objects. So why are researchers (including myself) still obsessed with something as simplistic as touching them?
The Eternal Quest for a Good Night Sleep
Saving the Sunshine: Health, Chronobiology, and Daylight Saving Time (DST)
Sir Patrick Manson at Home: 21 Queen Anne Street as hybrid space
This article explores the geographies of Patrick Manson’s home, arguing it was a crucial spatial context for his research and social networks. Published as a part of the McCarthy Award for the History of Medicine.
Seen and Unseen: The Representation of Visible and Hidden Disease in the Waxworks of Joseph Towne at the Gordon Museum
An open access article on the waxworks of Joseph Towne for 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century
The Colyer Collection at the Hunterian Museum
Ming: The Forgotten Celebrity
A short note for the Archives of Natural History exploring the life and afterlife of the London Zoo panda Ming. This research contributes to a growing interest in the afterlives of animals in museums and tracks the decline of interest in comparative anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons.