Being Human
Medicine, Technology and the Household
Will bring together participants from the natural
sciences, social sciences and the humanities to share
expertise with reference to the question ‘What is
‘human’?’ in the past and present. It aims at
providing opportunities to think creatively across
disciplines about the different ways in which
knowledge of the human subject is produced. We
also want to consider how to enhance our research
findings in this and related areas by translating them
into policy and practice at local, national and
international levels. The two questions we therefore
propose as the focus of ‘Being Human’ are: How can
we foster and maximize our research through new
and creative but also effective ways of collaborating
across disciplines and faculties? And: How can we, as
academics working on ‘the human subject’, combine
and maximize our rational and imaginative powers
to impact the world around us? Or, to frame the
second question otherwise: What do academics
have to offer to the wider public in 'being human'
and to the individual and collective decision makers
in society? What is our obligation to our
communities, and how do we best fulfil it?
When we consider the household as a place of caring and
curing from the Victorian period onwards, we envisage a
shift from traditional approaches linked to self-knowledge
towards faith in across-the-counter medications and the
lure of the druggists’ shop. We also assume a decline in the
home as a therapeutic space and site of medical decisionmaking, following its early modern heyday, in the face of a
growth in medical authority and institutional provision of
medical care. However, such apparent transformations in
healing activities in the home have remained largely
unexamined.
Dr Roberta Bivins, Dr Claire Jones,
Professor Hilary Marland
Medicine and the Human Sciences
Dr Claudia Stein
Poverty In India
‘Science, Technology and Medicine in
India, 1930 – 2000: The problem of
poverty’
Convened by Dr Sarah Hodges
This three-year programme of research,
workshops and teaching connects established
faculty, post-doctoral scholars and postgraduates
in India and the UK to examine how far and how
effectively projects of science, technology and
medicine have addressed questions of poverty in
India or instead contributed to their
intensification (or concealment) between 1930
and 2000.
Hilary Marland will interrogate what she suggests was a
major increase in the scale and variety of medical activities
located in the nineteenth-century household.
Claire Jones will focus on the role of the commercial sector
in facilitating an expansion of household practices that
allowed emergent medical industries intimate access to
domestic lives, through the case study of contraceptive
technologies before the Pill, 1860-1960.
Roberta Bivins will examine the relationships and practices
forged by doctors and patients through the negotiated
high- and low-technological spaces of the twentiethcentury home from 1900 until the new NHS ‘internal
market’ reshaped British health and social care in 1990.
Picture Courtesy of
the Wellcome Library
Director: Dr Claudia Stein
Web: www.warwick.ac.uk/go/chm
Email: t.horton@warwick.ac.uk