Individual Scholar Page

Personal Info

Photo

About Me

I am social historian of medicine with a penchant for the Admiralty’s archives, tales of injured seamen, and enterprising naval surgeons. I am primarily interested in how institutional structures and regulatory policies shape medical care and, in turn, how medical practice was negotiated within these confines. After two years working as a research assistant in a clinical research hospital, I became fascinated in what patient data could reveal about policies, regulations, and medical practice. I then decided to making the leap and examine these systems at work in the distant past.

I am currently completing a PhD at the University of St. Andrews, titled: “Surgeons at Sea: Negotiating the Boundaries of Medical Practice in the British Royal Navy, 1793-1815″. My doctoral research uses naval surgeons’ journals from the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815) to explore medical practice in the British Royal Navy. Applying a social lens to these medical records, I examine how surgeons operated as naval officers, medical practitioners, scientists, and administrators. In particular, I am concerned with how naval surgeons challenged or subverted norms of medical practice or mandated jurisdiction in order to carve out their own roles in the liminal and transitory space of the ship. My project also explores how medical knowledge was constructed at sea through medical experimentation, dissections, and systematic studies of disease. My work is in conversation with scholarship on the professionalisation and bureaucratisation of military medicine and the influences of the military on modern, clinical medicine. This research is funded by a Wolfson Postgraduate Scholarship in the Humanities.

Through this doctoral research, I have become especially interested in the intersection between labour and medicine; particularly how ‘ability’ was conceived both socially and medically. I hope to explore this in more depth in a future project on medical invalidation and ageing in the Royal Navy. This project will continue to use the surgeons’ logs to explore how surgeons viewed ‘old age’ and ‘infirmity’ and what medical assumptions guided their determination of whether a patient was ‘fit for service’. Keeping the Admiralty’s bureaucratic records at the heart of my study, I then plan to examine the systems in place after invalidation.

Recent Publications

Media Coverage

Social Media

Country Focus

Britain

Expertise by Geography

British Isles, United Kingdom

Expertise by Chronology

18th century, 19th century, Modern

Expertise by Topic

Disability, Environment, Labor, Medicine, Military, Science