Social Dynamics and the Management of Sickness and Healthcare in Elite English Families, c.1620-1750
Supervisor: Dr Mark Jenner
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.
"Abigail Harley and Brampton Bryan: making a medical commonwealth", Early Modern Medicine (June 2020)