Participant Info

First Name
Rebecca
Last Name
Wynter
Country
Netherlands
State
Affiliation
University of Amsterdam
Website URL
https://www.uva.nl/en/profile/w/y/r.i.wynter/r.i.wynter.html
Keywords
British history, eighteenth century, nineteenth century, twentieth century, history of medicine, mental health, psychiatry, and first responders, Quaker history, First World War medicine, the Friends' Ambulance Unit, police history, history of burns injuries, history of cancer, history of complaining and whistleblowing in medicine, conscientious objection, prison history.
Availability
Media Contact
Additional Contact Information
r.i.wynter@uva.nl
PhD
PhD

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

I am a historian of medicine, with expertise in the history of psychiatry, mental health and first responders, and Quaker history. I work predominantly on the long-nineteenth and the twentieth centuries.

I am a Research Fellow in Health Humanities at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). My current project is entitled ‘Policing Mental Disorder in London and Amsterdam c.1945-2020′. Before UvA, I was Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Birmingham. Most recently I was entrusted to research historic incidents of so-called ‘aversion therapy’ used for sexual reorientation (usually on men who had sex with men) by University of Birmingham psychology and psychiatry staff in the 1960s and 1970s. Prior to that, I co-designed and was named researcher on the AHRC-funded project, “Forged by Fire’: burns injury and identity in Britain, c.1800-2000’, a unique collaboration between medical historians at the University of Birmingham, urban historians at Leeds Beckett University, and freelance artists, writers, and teachers.

Having also held research and visiting scholar positions at the Universities of Manchester and Strathclyde, and Worcestershire World War 100, since 2012 I have had a sustained connection with Woodbrooke and Quakers in Britain. I was until 2025 editor of the learned journal, Quaker Studies. I continue to teach and supervise postgraduate Quaker Studies students.

Much of my research broadly aligns with two key themes: conscience in medicine and medical reform; and how medicine and science have been communicated and understood.

The core areas of my research career are:

  • asylums, psychiatry and mental health
  • neurosurgery, phantom limbs, epilepsy and learning disability
  • complaints, whistleblowers and patient activism
  • Quakers, medical volunteering, and humanitarianism, particularly during 1914-1919
  • ambulance, burns and fire disasters
  • and the criminal justice system (especially relating to police, criminal trials and prisons)

Find out more about me and my work here.

Recent Publications

Books

2023     Anniversaries, Memory and Mental Health in International Historical Perspective: Faith in Reform, co-edited and Chapter 1 with Rob Ellis and Jennifer Wallis (London: Palgrave Macmillan).

2020 A Quaker Conscientious Objector: The prison letters of Wilfrid Littleboy, 1917-1919, edited and introduction with Pink Dandelion (Bath: Handheld Press).

2014 Complaints, Controversies and Grievances in Medicine: Historical and Social Science Perspectives, edited and introduction with Jonathan Reinarz (London: Routledge).

Journal Articles

2025    ‘The persistence of history: Racism, anti-Blackness, and the causes of mental ill health, c.1800–2020′, with Niyah Campbell, Sarah Chaney and Sarah Marks, History of the Human Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1177/09526951251331378.

2024     ‘An Inclusive History of LGBTQ+ Aversion Therapy: Past Harms and Future Address in a UK Context’, with Kate Davison, Katherine Hubbard, Sarah Marks and Hel Spandler, Review of General Psychology.  https://doi.org/10.1177/10892680241289904.

2024     “Almost nothing is firmly established’: A History of Heredity and Genetics in Mental Health Science’, with Sarah Chaney and Sarah Marks, Wellcome Open Research.  https://doi.org/10.12688/wellcomeopenres.20628.1.

2024     ‘Choreographing Urban Ambulance in Britain, c.1870-1920: Movement, Gender, Biological Time, and the City’ (with Shane Ewen), Social History, 49(1), 78-105.  https://doi.org/10.1080/03071022.2024.2281151.

2021     ‘Ambition, ‘Failure’ and the Laboratory: Birmingham as a Centre of Twentieth-Century British Scientific Psychiatry’, British Journal for the History of Science, 54 (1), 19-40.  https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087421000017.

2017     ‘Historical Contexts to Communicating Mental Health’ (with Len Smith), Medical Humanities, 43 (2), 73-80.  https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2016-011082.

2016     ‘Conscription, Conscience and Controversy: the Friends’ Ambulance Unit and the ‘Middle Course’ in the First World War’, Quaker Studies, 21 (2), 213-33.  https://doi.org/10.3828/quaker.2016.21.2.6.

2015     ‘Pictures of Peter Pan: Institutions, Local Definitions of ‘Mental Deficiency’, and the Filtering of Children in Early Twentieth-Century England’, Family and Community History, 18 (2), 122-138. https://doi.org/10.1179/1463118015Z.00000000045.

2011     “Good in all respects’: appearance and dress at Staffordshire County Lunatic Asylum, 1818-1854’, History of Psychiatry, 22 (1), 40-57. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957154X10380014.

Chapters

2025     ‘Law and Medicine: A History in Three Acts’ (with Jonathan Reinarz and Gayle Davis), Jean McHale and Atina Krajewska (eds), Reimagining Health Law: From Medical to Health and Social Care Law (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar), forthcoming.

2025     ‘Photographic Memories: Historians, Family History, Mental Health and the Ethics of Sharing’, Anna Lavis and Karin Eli (eds), Exploring Mental Health through Material Objects: Transdisciplinary Perspectives (London: Routledge), forthcoming.

2022     “Go anywhere, do anything’: The Friends Ambulance Unit, 1914–1959’, Rhiannon Grant and C. Wess Daniels (eds), The Quaker World (London: Routledge), 502-512.

2021     ‘Mind/Brain’ (with Stephen Casper), in Jonathan Reinarz (ed.), A Cultural History of Medicine, Volume IV: The Age of Empire, 1800-1920 (London: Bloomsbury), 175-198.

2015     ‘Horrible dens of deception’: Thomas Bakewell, Thomas Mulock, and Anti-Asylum Sentiments, c.1815-1858’, in Tom Knowles and Serena Trowbridge (eds), Insanity and the Lunatic Asylum in the Nineteenth Century (London: Pickering & Chatto), 11-28.

2014     ‘The Spirit of Medicine: The use of alcohol in nineteenth-century medical practice’ (with Jonathan Reinarz), in Susanne Schmid and Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp (eds), Drink in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Consumers, Cross-Currents, Conviviality (London: Pickering & Chatto), 121-41.

Special Issues

2017      ‘Communicating Mental Health’, Medical Humanities, 43 (2), edited with Leonard Smith.

2016     ‘Quaker Responses to the First World War’, Quaker Studies, 21 (2), edited with Pink Dandelion.

Other Key Publications

2022     ‘Conversion Therapy’ and the University of Birmingham, c.1966-1983, University of Birmingham, Official Report https://bit.ly/3eAXzEs.

2020     ‘Body and Mind: Are we adequately prepared for the toll this pandemic will take on mental health?’, Behind the Times section, History Today, October 2020, pp. 90-93, with Rob Ellis and Rob Light.

2014     ‘What’s in a Name? Shifting Definitions of Epilepsy and its Care, c.1870-1914’, Wellcome History, 21-23.

Media Coverage
Lead historian: 'World War I at Home: The Cadbury Brothers at War' (2014). Aired on: BBC1 Midlands, BBC2, and BBC4. Historian for the Friends' Ambulance Unit segments, 'Behind the Lines: A Great War Nurse and the Fight for Survival', view on YouTube.
Country Focus
United Kingdom
Expertise by Geography
British Isles, England, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Western Europe
Expertise by Chronology
18th century, 19th century, Modern, 20th century, 21st century
Expertise by Topic
Disability, Gender, Local & Regional, Material Culture, Medicine, Military, Religion, Science, Sexuality, Urban History, Women, World War I, World War II