Gender, Health and Medicine conference

keynote speakers

Professor Hilary Marland, Director of Centre for the History of Medicine
University of Warwick, Centre for the History of Medicine
Hilary Marland is Professor of History in the Department of History, and Director of the Centre for the History of Medicine. She is former editor of Social History of Medicine and has published on medical practice in the nineteenth century, including her monograph study, Medicine and Society in Wakefield and Huddersfield, 1780-1870 (1987), chemists and druggists, the dispensary movement, the history of midwifery, women and medicine, infant welfare, and women and insanity in the nineteenth century. She has edited a number of volumes, including The Art of Midwifery: Early Modern Midwives in Europe (1993, 1994) and The Task of Healing: Medicine, Religion and Gender in England and the Netherlands 1450-1800 (1996) (with Margaret Pelling). Her book on puerperal insanity, Dangerous Motherhood: Insanity and Childbirth in Victorian Britain was published by Palgrave in 2004.

Dr Margaret Pelling, Reader in Social History of Medicine
University of Oxford, Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine
Dr Pelling's early work focused on the history of public health and theories of disease in nineteenth-century Britain. Her research interests then changed to the early modern period, and to health, medicine and social conditions in towns, with particular reference to medicine at the level of the artisan, and to the health experience of different social groups, including women, children and older people. Dr Pelling's publications include the following: The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupations and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England (Readers in Urban History), 1998; Cholera, Fever and English Medicine, 1825-65 (Oxford Historical Monographs), 1978. She co-authored (with Frances White) Medical Conflicts in Early Modern London: Patronage, Physicians and Irregular Practitioners 1550-1640 (Oxford Studies in Social History), 2003, and has co-edited (with Richard M. Smith) Life, Death and the Elderly: Historical Perspectives (Studies in the Social History of Medicine), 1991 and (with Scott Mandelbrote) The Practice of Reform in Health, Medicine, and Science, 1500-2000, 2005.

Dr Sandra Cavallo, Reader in Early Modern History
Royal Holloway College, Department of History
Dr Cavallo’s research interests include social and cultural history of early modern Europe, especially Italy; family and gender history, history of medicine, health and the body; material culture and domestic practices.

She has recently completed a major study of the artisan world: the book Artisans of the Body in Early Modern Italy: Identities, Families and Masculinities, 2007, focuses on barbers, surgeons, wigmakers, jewellers and other trades involved in the appearance, health and well-being of the body, and aims to recreate the mindsets, work practices and organisation, social and family ties of this occupational milieu. Dr Cavallo's other publications include Charity and Power in Early Modern Italy: Benefactors and their Motives in Turin, 1541-1789: (Cambridge Studies in the History of Medicine), 1995. She has co-edited (with Lyndan Warner) Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, 1999 and (with David Gentilcore) Spaces, Objects and Identities in Early Modern Italian Medicine (Renaissance Studies Special Issues), forthcoming 2008.

Dr Cavallo intends to develop further her interests in the intersection between medical, hygienic and beauty care pratices in a study of popular health advice literature. Her current research activity also includes a study of early modern artisan's life-narratives. Dr Cavallo is co-editor of A Cultural History of Childhood and Family, volume 3: Early modern age (1400-1650), to be published by Berg in 2010.

She is Associate Director of the AHRB Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior and has been a member of the Getty funded team of scholars who have researched for the exhibition "The Renaissance at Home: art and life in the Italian house 1400-1600 ", Victoria and Albert Museum October-December 2006.