ÌÇÐÄTV

Office: Phone: Email: Office Hours:

Rm 3.52, third floor of the Faculty of Arts Building +44 (0)24 76575573 (internal extension 75573) E.Smith.10@warwick.ac.uk Tuesdays, 2-3pm (online by appointment, book here)

 

Academic Profile:

• 2015-present: Associate Professor in the History of Medicine, University of ÌÇÐÄTV
• 2011-2014: Teaching and Research Fellow in the History of Medicine, Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Oxford
• 2011: PhD in History, University of Cambridge
• 2006: MPhil in the History of Science, Medicine and Technology, University of Cambridge
• 2004: BA in History, McGill University

Teaching:

• HI907 Themes and Methods in Medical History (MA core module)
• HI991 Matters of Life and Death (MA core module)
• HI176 Mind, Body, and Society (undergraduate first-year option module)
• HI2L2 Life After Death: A History of Human Remains (undergraduate second-year option module)
• (undergraduate final-year Advanced Option module)

Research:

My research interests lie in the history of medicine and the life sciences in Britain and the British Empire since 1800, with a particular focus on colonial science and medicine, racial theory, human measurement, and the disciplinary histories of anthropology and anatomy.

I am co-director of the Centre for the History of Medicine, Science, and Technology, and Co-I on the UKRI Cross Research Council Resonsive Mode grant, CONTAIN: CONtact Tracing, Infection, and Transmission: An Interdisciplinary Approach.

I am currently completing a book on the rise and fall of craniometry (the study of skull measurements) for Cambridge University Press, and an edited collection of primary sources related to British colonial medicine in the nineteenth century, entitled Health, Disease and Empire, for Routledge. Prior to joining ÌÇÐÄTV in 2015, I contributed to the Wellcome-Trust funded project, From Sail to Steam at the University of Oxford, where I examined the impact of the nineteenth-century health reform movement on the Royal Navy, and the role played by maritime medicine in debates over nature and nurture, physical deterioration, and national efficiency.

Post-Graduate Supervision:

• Moksh Kalra (Funded by Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership)
• Mackenzie Moffat (Funded by Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership)

Publications:

Skulls, Nation and Empire: The Rise and Fall of British Craniology, 1800-1939 [Being revised for Cambridge University Press, UK]

Editor, Health, Disease and Empire [3-volume primary source collection for the Routledge Online Resources in Empire series, forthcoming]

'The End of Racial Science? Physical Anthropology, Experimental Psychology, and the Measurement of Difference in the Torres Strait, 1898-99,' in Horatiu Burcea (ed.), Anthropology and Travel Writing, 19th-21th Century: From Proto-Ethnographies to Self-Reflexive Travelogues (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006)

'' (The Conversation, 21/08/2025)

'Review: Beauty and the Brain: The Science of Human Nature in Early America, by Rachel E. Walker,' English Historical Review 139 (2024), 1290-1292.

'Understanding Colonial Medicine and Health Through the Personal Correspondence of Army Surgeon Albert Hartsuff,' (AM Digital, 2022)

'5,' Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 76 (2021), 53-77.

'Review: The Body Populace: Military Statistics and Demography in Europe before the First World War, by Heinrich Hartmann,' Social History of Medicine 34 (2021): 680-682.

'"Why Do We Measure Mankind?" Marketing Anthropometry in Late Victorian Britain,' History of Science 58 (2020): 142-165.

'Review: Fit to Practice: Empire, Race, Gender, and the Making of British Medicine, 1850-1980, by Douglas M. Haynes,' Medical History 63 (2019), 233-235.

'Cleanse or Die: British Naval Hygiene in the Age of Steam, 1840-1900' Medical History 62 (2018): 177-198.

‘Class, Health, and the Proposed British Anthropometric survey of 1904,’Social History of Medicine 28 (2015): 308-329.

'Review: Claude Blanckaert (ed.), La Venus hottentote: Entre Barnum et Museum,' Isis 106 (2015), 195-196.

‘Dead Medicine—Reviewing Sylvie Ferber (Ed.), The Body Divided: Human Beings and Human ‘Material’ in Modern Medical History and Richard Sugg’s Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians,’ The Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 32 (2015): 208-211.

‘Putting Racial Science in its Place—Reviewing Ann Fabian’s The Skull Collectors and B. Ricardo Brown’s Until Darwin,’ Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44 (2013): 443-446.

‘Skulls, Science, and the Spoils of War: Craniological Research at the United States Army Medical Museum, 1868-1900,’ Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 40 (2009): 156-167.