Humble dog from Darwin’s Expression of Emotions…
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images

Michaelmas Term 2012 History of Medicine Seminar Series
Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine,
Seminar Room, 47 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6PE

The following seminars will be held at on Mondays at 2.15pm
Coffee will be available from 2.00pm

‘Health and Medicine in Britain and its Empire’
Convener: Professor Mark Harrison

Week 8 – 26 November
Michael Worboys, University of Manchester
“Saving the Lives of Our Dogs”: The Development of Canine Distemper Vaccine in Interwar Britain

About the speaker
Professor Michael Worboys is Professor at the Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Manchester. His research is focused in three connected areas: the history of infectious diseases; how research findings are translated into clinical practices; and science, medicine and the making of the modern domestic dog. Hi most recent book on infectious diseases was entitled Mad Dogs and Englishmen: Rabies in Britain, 1830-2000 (2007), co-authored with Dr Neil Pemberton. Research for the book on rabies led to a project on pedigree dog breeding in Victorian Britain, which will look at the growth of the dog fancy and the creation of fancy dogs. In January 2012, he began a new project entitled ‘Pedigree Chums: Science, medicine and the remaking of the dog in the twentieth century,’ exploring how changing ideas and practices on breeding, feeding, training and treating altered the physical form, bodily function, behaviour, health and meanings of different types of dog: pet, show, working, laboratory and stray-dangerous.

Selected publications

• Robert W G Kirk and Michael Worboys. (2011). ‘Medicine and species: one medicine, one history’. In Mark Jackson (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine. (pp. 561-577). Oxford: Oxford University Press Copy available in Wellcome Unit Library atR131 OXF 2011

• Worboys, M. (2010). ‘Health and Disease’. In Michael Sappol and Stephen P. Rice (Ed.), A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Age of Empire (1800 – 1920). (pp. 61-86). Oxford Copy held in Bodleian Social Science Library

• Pemberton N, Worboys, M. (2007). Mad Dogs and Englishmen: Rabies in Britain, 1830-2000. Palgrave Copy available in Wellcome Unit Library at  RA644.R3 PEM 2007

Related Links

• SOLO Library Catalogue – search Oxford libraries online
• Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine events webpage