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Department of History and Philosophy of Science

 

Public lectures

  • Recipes to Improve Your Love Life: Advice from the Eighteenth Century
    Lisa Smith (University of Essex), 31 March 2016
  • After IVF: The Reproductive Turn in Social Thought
    Inaugural lecture by Professor Sarah Franklin (Department of Sociology), 30 October 2013
  • Born to Rule: Royal Births in Tudor and Stuart England
    Peter Jones (King's College, Cambridge) and Mary Fissell (Johns Hopkins University), 18 and 25 June 2013

Exhibitions

  • CASEBOOKS: Six Contemporary Artists and an Extraordinary Medical Archive
    Ambika P3, University of Westminster, March to April 2017
  • Books and Babies: Communicating Reproduction
    Cambridge University Library, July to December 2011

Reproduction on Film

  • Sex, Secrets and Lies
    Fifth 'Reproduction on Film' series, February to March 2016
  • Outlaws
    Fourth 'Reproduction on Film' series, February to March 2015
  • Making Babies
    Third 'Reproduction on Film' series, February to March 2013
  • Monstrosity
    Second 'Reproduction on Film' series, February to March 2012
  • Reproductive Dystopias
    First 'Reproduction on Film' series, March 2011

Workshops and conferences

  • The Contested History of Hormone Pregnancy Tests
    27 January 2017
  • Reproductive Politics in France and Britain
    5–7 September 2016
  • Sex, Disease and Fertility in History
    28–30 September 2015
  • Reproduction on Film
    23–25 September 2015
  • Con/Tested: Sperm Science, Sterility and Masculinity
    11–12 September 2014
  • Cities and Towns as Epidemiological Drivers: Emerging Issues in Urban Historical Demography
    17–18 March 2014
  • Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reproduction 9
    15 November 2013
  • Making Love, Making Gender, Making Babies in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s
    6–7 September 2013
  • In/Fertility and Sacred Space: From Antiquity to the Early Modern
    15–16 July 2013
  • Notebooks, Medicine and the Sciences in Early Modern Europe
    12–13 July 2013
  • Generation and Reproduction in Medieval Europe
    8 December 2012, preceded by a lecture by Marianne Elsakkers (Utrecht) on 7 December
  • Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reproduction 8
    23 November 2012
  • Reproducing China: Childbirth, One Child, and Beyond
    13–14 July 2012
  • Making Human Heredity: Populations and Public Health in the Postwar Era
    28–30 June 2012
  • Transforming Pregnancy Since 1900
    29–30 March 2012
  • Communicating Reproduction
    5–6 December 2011
  • Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reproduction 7
    18 November 2011
  • Alchemy and Medicine from Antiquity to the Enlightenment
    22–24 September 2011
  • Leprosy, Language and Identity in the Medieval World
    12–13 April 2011
  • Reproduction and the Sciences in Cambridge
    8 April 2011
  • Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reproduction 6
    12 November 2010
  • Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reproduction 5
    30 October 2009
  • Seriality and Scientific Objects in the Age of Capital and Empire, 1848–1919
    22–23 April 2009
  • Ancient Greek and Roman Scientific, Medical and Technical Writing
    21 March 2009
  • Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reproduction 4
    14 November 2008
  • Seriality and Scientific Objects in an Age of Revolution, 1780–1848
    16–17 June 2008
  • Ancient Greek and Roman Medical and Scientific Writing
    15 March 2008
  • The 'Missing Link': Medicine in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages
    8 March 2008
  • Secrets and Knowledge: Medicine, Science and Commerce, 1500–1800
    15–16 February 2008
  • Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reproduction 3
    16 November 2007
  • Cases in Science, Medicine and the Law
    20–21 April 2007
  • PhD Workshop on Medieval and Early Modern Science and Medicine
    23 March 2007
  • Interdisciplinary Workshops on Reproduction 1 & 2
    17 November 2006 and 2 March 2007
  • Temporalizing the Great Chain of Being: A Reappraisal After 70 Years
    16 January 2007
  • Astrology and the Body, 1100–1800
    8–9 September 2006
  • Science and Medicine in the Multinational Empires of Central and Eastern Europe
    23 June 2006
  • Free School Lane Workshop on Reproduction
    17 October 2005
  • Between the Farm and the Clinic: Agriculture and Reproductive Technology in the Twentieth Century
    29 April 2005

Festival of Ideas events

  • Should We Be Having Babies at 20?
    21 October 2015
  • Is Menstruation Healthy?
    22 October 2014
  • Can Europe Reproduce Itself? Debating Europe's Fertility
    28 October 2013
  • Forging Frontiers in Classical Medicine: Exploring the Body
    Lecture by Rebecca Flemming, 26 October 2013
  • Debating Reproduction: Hospital Birth
    1 November 2012
  • Debating Reproduction: IVF
    20 October 2011

Wellcome Lectures

  • Nineteenth Cambridge Wellcome Lecture in the History of Medicine
    Pablo F. Gómez (University of Wisconsin–Madison): 'Slave trading and the imagination of the quantifiable body in the early modern South Atlantic', 8 February 2024
  • Eighteenth Cambridge Wellcome Lecture in the History of Medicine
    He Bian (Princeton University): 'Live, and let live: medical recipes and technique of the socialized self across the Ming-Qing transition', 26 January 2023
  • Seventeenth Cambridge Wellcome Lecture in the History of Medicine
    Gabriela Soto Laveaga (Harvard University): 'Seeds, a dying river, and an experiment station: re-examining 1960s global solutions to hunger from Sonora, Mexico', 20 January 2022
  • Sixteenth Cambridge Wellcome Lecture in the History of Medicine
    Sasha Turner (Johns Hopkins University): 'Doctors v. midwives: Caribbean medical encounters in the age of pronatal abolition', 11 February 2021
  • Fifteenth Cambridge Wellcome Lecture in the History of Medicine
    Sarah Richardson (Harvard University): 'The maternal imprint: gender, heredity and the biosocial body', 13 February 2020
  • Fourteenth Cambridge Wellcome Lecture in the History of Medicine
    Marta Hanson (Johns Hopkins University): 'Heaven and Earth are within one's grasp: the healer's body-as-technology in classical Chinese medicine', 17 January 2019
  • Thirteenth Cambridge Wellcome Lecture in the History of Medicine
    Alisha Rankin (Tufts University): 'Poison trials, panaceas and proof: debates about testing and testimony in early modern European medicine', 1 March 2018
  • Twelfth Cambridge Wellcome Lecture in the History of Medicine
    Alexandra Minna Stern (University of Michigan): 'Eugenic sterilization in California: from demographic analysis to digital storytelling', 24 November 2016
  • Eleventh Cambridge Wellcome Lecture in the History of Medicine
    Michael Stolberg (University of Würzburg): 'Curing diseases and exchanging knowledge: sixteenth-century physicians and their female patients', 14 January 2016
  • Tenth Cambridge Wellcome Lecture in the History of Medicine
    Rebecca Flemming (Classics, Cambridge): 'One-seed, two-seed, three-seed? Reassessing ancient theories of generation', 15 January 2015
  • Ninth Cambridge Wellcome Lecture in the History of Medicine
    Malcolm Nicolson (University of Glasgow): 'The clinic of the birth: obstetric ultrasound, medical innovation and the clinico-anatomical project', 16 January 2014
  • Eighth Cambridge Wellcome Lecture in the History of Medicine
    Maaike van der Lugt (Université Paris Diderot – Paris 7 / Institut Universitaire de France): 'Generatio: medieval debates about procreation, heredity and "bioethics"', 17 January 2013
  • Seventh Cambridge Wellcome Lecture in the History of Medicine
    Staffan Müller-Wille (University of Exeter): 'Revisiting the Mendelian revolution', 19 January 2012
  • Sixth Cambridge Wellcome Lecture in the History of Medicine
    Mary Fissell (Johns Hopkins University): 'Encountering Aristotle's Masterpiece, or how to find a racy book about reproduction', 20 January 2011
  • Fifth Cambridge Wellcome Lecture in the History of Medicine
    Angus McLaren (University of Victoria): 'Divorcing sex and reproduction: the discussion of artificial insemination in Britain, 1918–1948', 3 December 2009
  • Fourth Cambridge Wellcome Lecture in the History of Medicine
    Rayna Rapp (New York University): 'Making the invisible visible: the hidden history of families, schools, civil rights, media and science in the production of learning disabilities', 4 December 2008
  • Third Cambridge Wellcome Lecture in the History of Medicine
    Simon Szreter (St John's College, Cambridge): 'Proving a negative? How important was sexual abstinence during the fertility decline?', 29 November 2007
  • Second Cambridge Wellcome Lecture in the History of Medicine
    Hilary Marland (University of Warwick): 'Doctors, motherhood and insanity of childbirth in Victorian Britain', 23 November 2006
  • First Cambridge Wellcome Lecture in the History of Medicine
    Helen King (Reading University): 'Women's bodies in sixteenth-century medicine: using the classical tradition', 1 December 2005

Generation to Reproduction

 

Cambridge historians of medicine and biology are taking a long-term, cross-disciplinary approach to the history of reproduction.

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Making Visible Embryos

 

Explore our online exhibition on the history of embryo images.

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The Casebooks Project

 

Browse and search Simon Forman's and Richard Napier's records of thousands of consultations.

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