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Emma Marshall

Thesis

Thesis

Social Dynamics and the Management of Sickness and Healthcare in Elite English Families, c.1620-1750

Supervisor: Dr Mark Jenner

Research

Research

My research explores how experiences, practices and discourses of sickness and healthcare intersected with individual and familial identities, power dynamics and notions of order and authority within gentry households. Primarily based on original archival research into personal correspondence, my thesis aims to break down barriers between social, medical and political historiographies. It argues that quotidian healthcare activities both shaped and were shaped by complex interpersonal relationships within families and their communities, and were not simply expressions of love or benevolence. This project is funded by the Wolfson Foundation and grew out of my two previous dissertations. My undergraduate thesis, completed at Durham University, examined laywomen’s medical knowledge, while my Masters dissertation at York focused on marital conflict in the seventeenth-century church courts. My wider research interests include domestic life, medicine and the body, and the social history of early modern England more generally.

Papers and publications

Papers

  • "Recipes for Success: how women shared medical knowledge in the seventeenth century ", History Today; Vol. 68, Issue 4 (April 2018)
  • “Social Dynamics and the Management of Sickness and Healthcare in Elite English Families, c.1650-1750”, Northern Early Modern Network Virtual Conference, hosted by University of Edinburgh (26th November 2020)
  • “Siblings, Sickness and Healthcare in English Gentry Families, c.1650-1750”, Cabinet of Curiosities Virtual Colloquium, University of York (29 October 2020)
  • “Social Dynamics and the Management of Sickness and Healthcare in Elite English Families, c.1650-1750”, Annual Postgraduate Research Conference, University of York’s History Department (2nd October 2020)
  • “People, Place and Power: Re-Evaluating Domestic Healthcare”, 'Reconsidering Illness and Recovery' Virtual Conference (19 August 2020)
  • “Bonds and Boundaries: Familial Separation During Sickness, c.1680-1750”, ‘Distance’ Virtual Conference, hosted by University of York’s Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies and the University of Melbourne's Enlightenment Romanticism Contemporary Culture Research Unit (August 2020)
  • “If you please to have the doctor sent for, we will do it’: Absent parents, sick children and epistolary relationships, c.1650-1750’, Mothers and Fathers in the Premodern World conference, University of Cambridge (April 2021)
  • “The Parochial Politics of Gentry Healthcare Practices in Seventeenth-Century England”, Warwick Parish Symposium: Parish, Power and Politics (8 May 2021)
  • “‘My wife would not assist me in dressing my poor leg’: illness, healthcare and the politics of domestic labour’, Labour, Leisure and Life in Early Modern England seminar series (7 June 2021)
  • Co-convenor of ‘Emotion, Embodiment and the Everyday, c.1500-1800’, University of Cambridge (10 December 2021) (PGR and ECR conference funded by the Royal Historical Society, Society for the Social History of Medicine, and University of Cambridge Researcher Development Programme)
  • “Servants have not bodies of brasse’: Domestic service, sickness and healthcare in English gentry households, c.1650-1750', Health and Work in Early Modern Europe Conference, Ca'Foscari University of Venice (September 2022).

Publications

  • Book review: “Working With Paper: Gendered Practices in the History of Knowledge’, ed. Carla Bittel, Elaine Leong and Christine Von Oertzen (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019)’, Medical History 65, 4 (2021): 420-1.
  • “‘The Best That Ever I Had’: gifting a medical recipe in early modern Yorkshire”, The Recipes Project online blog (May 2021)

Blogpost

"Abigail Harley and Brampton Bryan: making a medical commonwealth", Early Modern Medicine (June 2020)

External activities

External activities

  • Wolfson Foundation Postgraduate Scholarship in the Humanities, 2019-2022
  • Undergraduate Dissertation of the Year, 2016 (awarded by The Royal Historical Society and History Today at the Longman-History Today Awards, 2017)
  • Social Secretary of the CREMS Postgraduate Forum, the Cabinet of Curiosities (2020-21)
  • Speaker on “Health and Power in the Past”, Warwick Postgraduate History Podcast Series (released 29th May 2020)

Contact details

Emma Marshall
PhD student
Department of History
University of York
Heslington
York
YO10 5DD