School of Social and Political Science

Background

Dr Jenny Bangham is a Lecturer in the History of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh. She uses historical approaches to understand the politics, administration, emotions, and authority of the biomedical sciences. Her first book, Blood Relations: Transfusion and the Making of Human Genetics (Chicago, 2020), traces the surprising connections between blood transfusion and the development of human genetics. She runs a Wellcome-funded project to recover how clinical genetics has been shaped by the disciplinary and gender politics of the NHS, disability rights, racial politics, and debates about the ethics of genetic testing. Her co-edited volume Invisible Labour in Modern Science (Rowman and Littlefield 2022) considers how people and practices are concealed, eclipsed, or anonymised in scientific and medical research. Jenny is developing a new project to chart the history of ‘rarity’ in biomedicine.