Call for papers
University of Birmingham
Via Zoom, Friday 5 December 2025
In recent years, material culture has expanded its reach through the humanities and social sciences, allowing for new kinds of histories to be written. In the medical humanities, the study of objects is one methodology that has allowed historians to move away from heroic histories of medical innovators and narratives of ‘progress’. Objects offer insights into the histories left out of official medical records: the everyday and quotidian; the actual, rather than ideal; emotion rather than action; and critically, the patient rather than the practitioner.
This one-day online workshop aims to bring together scholars from across the medical humanities working with material objects in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While work in the medical humanities is expanding rapidly, comparatively little has addressed earlier periods and contexts. Our focussing on the period 1700-1900 aims to address this dearth, as well as offering a longue-durée perspective that crosses conventional periodisations. In doing so, we will explore the rise of medical professionalism, proliferation of specialisms, growth of institutional care, and radically changing theories of the body and mind, within the context of lived experience of health and sickness.
We hope not only to share research but to enrich our practice in working with objects as primary sources. Together, we will explore the methodological pitfalls and possibilities of a material approach when dealing with historical periods, as well as historically marginalised groups. In doing so, the workshop hopes to develop and advance methods for creatively and ethically analysing histories of medicine and health.
We welcome proposals for 15-minute talks on a single object relating to health or medicine in the period 1700-1900. Papers may address themes including, but not limited to:
- Medical education
- Medical practice
- Health and personal care
- Medical personas and identities
- Patient identities and histories
- Sexuality, sexology and sexual health
- Health inequalities linked to race and class
- Mental health and wellbeing
- Anatomy, pathology and physiology
- Fine art and visual culture at its intersections with medicine and health
- Health and medicine in museums and archive collections
The workshop will take place on Friday 5th December 2025 and is hosted by Dr Anna Jamieson and Dr Rebecca Whiteley. Interested participants should submit a proposal of 250-words and an image of their chosen object, as well a biography of no more than 150-words, in a single document to: a.jamieson@bham.ac.uk and r.k.whiteley@bham.ac.uk by: Monday 6th October.
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