Section: Science Technology and Innovation Studies

Steve Sturdy

Name
Dr Steve Sturdy
Title
Seconded to Genomics Forum for 3 years from 01/09/06
Organisation
Science Studies, School of Social and Political Science
University of Edinburgh
Address
St John's Land Holyrood Road Edinburgh UK
Telephone
+44 (0)131 651 4741
E-Mail
URL
http://www.sps.ed.ac.uk/staff/stis/sturdy_steve
Photo: Steve Sturdy

Qualifications

  • MA (Natural Sciences) University of Cambridge
  • MA (Philosophy of Science) University of Western Ontario
  • PhD (Science Studies) University of Edinburgh

Research Interests

My research focuses on the relations between medical science, medical practice and medical policy in Britain, chiefly during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, I draw on the sociology of scientific knowledge to illuminate the relationship between scientific knowledge and medical practice. My current research concentrates on the constitution of medical cases as objects of scientific knowledge. Other work under way examines the role of the laboratory sciences in the reorganization of medical practice in early twentieth-century Britain.

PhD Supervision

I am interested in supervising PhD research on all aspects of the history and sociology of medical science and practice from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. I have supervised or am currently supervising PhDs on the following topics:

  • Women in medicine in late 19th- and early 20th-century Edinburgh
  • Unconventional therapies in contemporary general practice
  • Transsexualism and the heterosexual matrix
  • The Scottish roots of the National Health Service
  • The social construction of prion disease
  • Euthanasia debates in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain
  • Popular evolutionary psychology in the UK
  • The emergence of ethology as a field science
  • The social construction of the obesity epidemic
  • The transition from medical geography to germ theory in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Colombia
  • The transformation of the drug approval and clinical trials system in late twentieth-century USA
  • Cholera and the International Sanitary Congresses in the mid nineteenth century
  • Forensic medicine in the contemporary criminal justice system

Selected Publications

"Scientific method for medical practitioners: The case method of teaching pathology in early twentieth-century Edinburgh", Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 81 (2007), 760-792.

"Knowing cases: biomedicine in Edinburgh, 1887-1920", Social Studies of Science, 37 (2007), 659-689.

"Making sense in the pathology museum" in Anatomy Acts: How We Come to Know Ourselves, ed. Andrew Patrizio and Dawn Kemp (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2006), pp.107-115.

Medicine, Health and the Public Sphere in Britain, 1600-2000, ed. Steve Sturdy (Routledge, 2002)

War, Medicine and Modernity, Roger Cooter, Mark Harrison and Steve Sturdy (Sutton, 1998)

Medicine and Modern Warfare, ed. Roger Cooter, Mark Harrison and Steve Sturdy, (Rodopi, 1999)

"Science, scientific management, and the transformation of medicine in Britain c.1870-1950", History of Science, 36 (1998), 421-466 (with Roger Cooter)

"Hippocrates and state medicine: George Newman outlines the founding policy of the Ministry of Health", in Christopher Lawrence and George Weisz (eds), Greater Than the Parts: Holism in Biomedicine 1920-1950 (Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 112-134

"From the trenches to the hospitals at home: physiologists, clinicians and oxygen therapy, 1914-1930", in J.V. Pickstone (ed.), Medical Innovations in Historical Perspective (Macmillan, 1992), pp. 104-123.

"The political economy of scientific medicine: science, education and the transformation of medical practice in Sheffield, 1890-1922", Medical History, 36 (1992), 125-159.

"Biology as social theory: John Scott Haldane and physiological regulation", British Journal for the History of Science, 21 (1988), 315-340.

This page was published on 3 September 2008


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