Professor Hilary Marland

Contact Information

Office: Humanities Building H315
Phone: (024) 76522506
Email: Hilary.Marland@warwick.ac.uk
Office Hours: Research Leave 2011-12

Academic Profile

Professor of History, University of Warwick
2009-11 Director of the Institute of Advanced Study (IAS), University of Warwick
1998-2008 Director of the Centre for the History of Medicine, University of Warwick
1996-2001 Wellcome University Award Holder, University of Warwick
1987-96 Research Lecturer, Department of Philosophy, Ethics and the History of Medicine, Erasmus University Rotterdam
1987-90 Research Lecturer, Institute of Medical History, Free University Amsterdam
1985-87 Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Oxford (Social Science Research Council)
PhD Warwick (1984)

Undergraduate Modules Taught

Postgraduate Modules Taught

Themes and Methods in Medical History (team taught)
Dangerous Bodies: Women and Modern Medicine 1830-1950 (not on offer 2011-12)
Migration, Health and Ethnicity in Modern History (with Roberta Bivins, not on offer 2011-12)

Research and Professional Activities

My research centres on the social and cultural history of medicine and health, particularly in modern Britain. My PhD (1984) focused on medical practice in the West Riding of Yorkshire in the nineteenth century, resulting in my 1987 monograph Medicine and Society in Wakefield and Huddersfield, 1780-1870 (Cambridge University Press, 1987, 2008). Following my move to Holland in 1987 (Free University Amsterdam/Erasmus University Rotterdam), my research interests came to focus particularly on midwifery and childbirth in the Netherlands in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. I have also published on the history of alternative medicine, chemists and druggists, 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). I am currently writing a book on medical and health advice literature for young women in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, that explores the ways in which medical ideas impacted on debates on girls' access to education, the workplace and recreation, and intersected with concerns about female adolescence more broadly. I was Principal Investigator (with Dr Jane Adams as RF) on a Wellcome Trust-funded project curing with water 1840s-1940s, that has triggered an interest in domestic healing practices in the nineteenth century. The intersection of the household with emerging technologies and approaches to health is the subject of a new programme of work which I am developing with Centre for the History of Medicine colleague Dr Roberta Bivins. In 2010 I started work on a Wellcome Trust supported project, together with Dr Catherine Cox at University College Dublin (with Dr Sarah York as RF), on Irish migration and mental illness between the Great Famine and Irish Independence, which will result in a co-authored book. Between 1996 and 2000 I edited the journal Social History of Medicine and was Associate Editor on the New DNB for the sections gynaecology, obstetrics and paediatrics. Between 2005-9 I served on the Wellcome Trust History of Medicine Funding Panel, and I am currently a member of the Trust's Society Awards Panel. I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, member of the American Association for the History of Medicine. and serve on the editorial boards of Social History of Medicine and History of Psychiatry. From 1999 to 2008 I was Director of the Centre for the History of Medicine at Warwick: during this period the Centre won two prestigious Strategic Awards from the Wellcome Trust and developed into a large and vibrant research community. Between August 2009 and August 2011 I served as Director of the Institute of Advanced Study at Warwick, launching several new schemes, including the IAS Postdoctoral Research Fellowships.

Select Publications

Medicine and Society in Wakefield and Huddersfield 1780-1870 (Cambridge University Press, 1987, republished in paperback 2008).
'Mother and Child were Saved'. The Memoirs (1693-1740) of the Frisian Midwife Catharina Schrader (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1987).
H. Marland (ed.), The Art of Midwifery: Early Modern Midwives in Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 1993, 1994).
'A Pioneer in Infant Welfare: The Huddersfield Scheme 1903-1920', Social History of Medicine, 5 (1993), 25-49.
'Questions of Competence: The Midwife Debate in the Netherlands in the Early Twentieth Century', Medical History, 39 (1995), 317-37.
'"Pioneer Work on all Sides": The First Generations of Women Physicians in the Netherlands, 1879-1930', Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 50 (1995), 437-73.
H. Marland and M. Pelling (eds), The Task of Healing: Medicine, Religion and Gender in England and the Netherlands, 1450-1800 (Rotterdam: Erasmus Publishing, 1996).
H. Marland and A.-M. Rafferty (eds), Midwives, Society and Childbirth: Debates and Controversies in the Modern Period (London and New York: Routledge, 1997).
'"Destined to a Perfect Recovery": The Confinement of Puerperal Insanity in the Nineteenth Century', in J. Melling and B. Forsythe (eds), Insanity, Institutions and Society, 1800-1914 (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 137-56.
'Childbirth and Maternity', in R. Cooter and J. Pickstone (eds), Medicine in the Twentieth Century (Amsterdam: Harwood International, 2000), 559-574.
'Smooth, Speedy, Painless and Still Midwife Delivered? The Dutch Midwife and Childbirth Technology in the Early Twentieth Century', in L. Conrad and A. Hardy (eds), Women in Modern Medicine, Wellcome Institute Series in the History of Medicine (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2001), 173-94.
'"Uterine Mischief": W.S. Playfair and his Neurasthenic Patients', in Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra and R. Porter (eds), Cultures of Neurasthenia from Beard to the First World War, Wellcome Series in the History of Medicine (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2001), 117-39
'Getting Away with Murder?: Puerperal Insanity, Infanticide and the Defence Plea', in Mark Jackson (ed.), Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Its Concealment, 1550-2000 (London: Athlone, 2002). 168-92.
H. Marland and M. Gijswijt-Hofstra (eds), Cultures of Child Health in Britain and the Netherlands in the Twentieth Century, Wellcome Institute Series in the History of Medicine (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2003).
'Midwives, Missions and Reform: Colonizing Dutch Childbirth Services at Home and Abroad ca. 1900', in Mary P. Sutphen and Bridie Andrews (eds), Medicine and Colonial Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 61-78
'Disappointment and Desolation: Women, Doctors and Interpretations of Puerperal Insanity in the Nineteenth Century', History of Psychiatry, 14 (2003), 303-20.
Dangerous Motherhood: Insanity and Childbirth in Victorian Britain (Houndmills: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004)
'The Changing Shape of the Hospital, 1800-1900', in Deborah Brunton (ed.), Medicine Transformed: Health, Disease and Society in Europe, 1800-1930, OUP Course Book, A218 (Manchester University Press, 2004), 49-78.
(With Jane Adams), 'Hydropathy at Home: The Water Cure and Domestic Healing in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Britain', Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 83 (2009), 499-529.
(With Vicky Long), 'From Danger and Motherhood to Health and Beauty: Health Advice for the Factory Girl in Early Twentieth-Century Britain', Twentieth Century British History, 20 (2009), 454-81.
‘Women, Health and Medicine’, in Mark Jackson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine (Oxford University Press, 2011), 484-502.
‘Under the Shadow of Maternity: Birth, Death and Puerperal Insanity in Victorian Britain’, History of Psychiatry, 23 (2012), 78-90.

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