Please join us for the final seminar of term – and of the academic year!
At: The Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine
Seminar Room, 47 Banbury Road, Oxford
Coffee is available from 2.00pm – Seminars begin at 2.15pm prompt
‘Reproduction, Gender, and Sexuality in the History of Medicine’
Conveners: Marisa Benoit and Julianne Weis
Week 8 – 16 June
Hilary Marland, University of Warwick
‘Girls’ bodies: The Ends of Health Advice Literature in Britain, c.1900′
This paper explores the creation of new models of ‘citizen girl’, as towards the end of the 19th century interest in the health of adolescent girls and its management was prompted by a medical discourse that emphasised the risks of youth in general and of female adolescence in particular. At the same time, girlhood was defined as a unique phase with opportunities for building good practices in terms of health. The press, magazines, general interest journals and advice books were utilised by an expanding range of ‘experts’ in addition to doctors to spread messages about methods of achieving good health: mental and physical. This was envisaged as being supported by the efforts of girls themselves, and became embedded in debates about their expanding opportunities at school, in the workplace, and sport and recreation, as well as their future roles as wives and mothers.
Hilary Marland is Professor of History at the University of Warwick. Her esearch focuses of the social and cultural history of medicine and health, particularly in modern Britain. Her PhD (Warwick 1984) explored medical practice in the West Riding of Yorkshire in the nineteenth century, resulting in her 1987 monograph Medicine and Society in Wakefield and Huddersfield, 1780-1870 (Cambridge University Press, 1987, 2008). She has also researched and published on the history of childbirth and midwifery, alternative medicine, medicine and the household, women and medicine, infant and maternal welfare, neurasthenia, child health, and the health of factory girls. I have an ongoing interest in women and mental illness and published Dangerous Motherhood: Insanity and Childbirth in Victorian Britain in 2004 (Palgrave-Macmillan). She has recently completed a book on medical and health advice literature for young women, Health and Girlhood in Britain, 1874-1920 (Palgrave-Macmillan). This explores the intersection of ideas on health, medicine and adolescence with debates on girls’ access to education, the workplace and recreation, and focuses on practices of health outside of medical institutions and girls’ engagement with advice literature. 
She was Principal Investigator on a Wellcome Trust-funded project curing with water 1840s-1940s, that triggered her interest in domestic healing practices in the nineteenth century. She is currently researching the intersection of the household with new and traditional approaches to health and its technologies in the long nineteenth century, including surveys of recipe books and chemists’ prescription books. In 2010, with Dr Catherine Cox at UCD, she started work on a Wellcome Trust supported project on Irish migration and mental illness between the Great Famine and Irish Independence, which has resulted in a series of articles and a co-edited volume.
Please note there is no parking at the Unit