Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine: Next steps

The current work at the Centre is structured around its five-year Wellcome Trust Strategic Award on medicine and modernity, which was awarded in June 2006. With the support of this award, the Centre is exploring the many NHS changes of the last 30 years, medical technologies, and diseases of modernity, along with new themes such as molecularisation of medicine, and animal health and welfare.

Professor Worboys and colleagues have been recently awarded a Programme Grant by the Trust to investigate the changing relationship between biomedical research and clinical practice since 1950, up until the creation of 'Translational Medicine' in the early 2000s. They aim to explore the historical dynamics of biomedical research practices, such as the adoption of animal models for human diseases, and their integration with diagnosis and therapy. Using a focus on particular mental disorders, dementia and stroke, the research will analyse the complex and contingent interactions between the laboratory and the clinic.

A new research group on the history of modern forensic medicine is led by Dr Ian Burney. His past research focused largely on the Victorians, probing the often fraught relationship between medico-legal and public understandings of death. With Neil Pemberton, Dr Burney undertook a Trust-funded survey of twentieth-century British forensics, which explored the shift from the traditional "body-centred" investigations to the new and increasingly powerful model of forensic science and criminal detection that is centred on the fragmented corpse and its embeddedness in the "Crime Scene".