Dr Margaret Pelling

cropped for academia edu jul2017 rotated
Senior Associate Member
Faculty of History | Centre for the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology
+44 (0)1865 274608
margaret.pelling@history.ox.ac.uk

One focus of my research has been the lower orders of medical practitioner in early modern England, in particular the 'excluded middle', barbers and barber-surgeons and their status in civic society. I am currently taking this forward with a book-length project on the cultural functions of barbers, c. 1500-2000. I am also researching a third study on the mid-17th London citizen and proto-statistician John Graunt and his religious context.

My earliest work was on British public health in the 19th century, and in particular theories of epidemic and endemic infectious disease before the bacteriological revolution. I focused on the Benthamite sanitarians, William Farr of the Registrar General's department, and the early epidemiologists John Snow and William Budd, but with a view also to establishing the climate of received opinion against which these figures can be contrasted.

Academia

Select Publications

‘Managing Uncertainty and Privatising Apprenticeship: Status and Relationships in English Medicine, 1500-1900', Social History of Medicine, 32,1 (2019), 34-56

‘"The Very Head and Front of My Offending": Beards,Portraiture and Self-Presentation in Early Modern England', in J. Evans and A. Withey (eds.), New Perspectives on the History of Facial Hair: Framing the Face (Palgrave Macmillan/Springer, Cham, Switz, 2018), pp. 33-67

‘John Graunt, the Hartlib Circle, and Child Mortality in Mid-Seventeenth-Century London’, Continuity and Change, 31, 3 (2016), 335-59 

‘Far Too Many Women? John Graunt, the Sex Ratio and the Cultural Determination of Number in Seventeenth-Century England’, The Historical Journal, 59, 3 (2016), 695-719

‘Appearance and Reality: Barber‑Surgeons, the Body and  Disease', in A. L. Beier and R. Finlay (eds.), London 1500‑1700: The Making of the Metropolis (Longman, London and New York, 1986), pp. 82‑112; repr. in part in P. Elmer and Ole Peter Grell (eds.), Health, Disease and Society in Europe 1500-1800: A Source Book (Manchester University Press/Open University Press, 2004); shortened and trans. version in Maria Conforti, A. Carlino and A. Clericuzio (eds.), Interpretare e curare: medicina e salute nel Rinascimento (Carocci Frecce, Rome, 2013), pp. 169-87, 364-9

‘Corporatism or Individualism: Parliament, the Navy, and the  Splitting of the London Barber-Surgeons’ Company in 1745’, in I. Gadd and P. Wallis (eds.), Guilds and Association in Europe, 900-1900 (Centre for Metropolitan History, London, 2007), pp. 57-82

‘Scenes from Professional Life: Medicine, Moral Conduct, and Interconnectedness in Middlemarch’, in Politics and Culture in Victorian Britain: Essays in Memory of Colin Matthew, ed. P. Ghosh and L. Goldman (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006), pp. 220-36

‘Politics, Medicine, and Masculinity: Physicians and Office-bearing in Early Modern England’, in M. Pelling and S. Mandelbrote (eds.), The Practice of Reform in Health, Medicine, and Science, 1500-2000: Essays for Charles Webster (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2005), pp. 81-105

Medical Conflicts in Early Modern London: Patronage, Physicians and Irregular Practitioners 1550-1640 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003)

‘Contagion/Germ Theory/Specificity', Chapter 16 of Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine, ed. W. F. Bynum and R. Porter, 2 vols. (Routledge, London and New York, 1993), vol. i, pp. 309-34; revised version as ‘The Meaning of Contagion: Reproduction, Medicine and Metaphor’, in A. Bashford and C. Hooker (eds.), Contagion: Historical and Cultural Studies (Routledge, London and New York, 2001), pp. 15-38; p/b edn as Contagion: Epidemics, History and Culture from Smallpox to Anthrax (Pluto Press, Annandale, NSW, 2002)

‘Skirting the City? Disease, Social Change and Divided Households in the Seventeenth Century’, in P. Griffiths and M. Jenner (eds.), Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London (Manchester UP, Manchester and New York, 2000), pp. 154-75

'Who Most Needs to Marry? Ageing and Inequality among Women and Men in Early Modern Norwich’, in L. Botelho and P. Thane (eds.), Women and Ageing in British Society since 1500 (Longman, Harlow, 2001), pp. 31-42

The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupations and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England (Longman, London, 1998)

‘Compromised by Gender: The Role of the Male Medical Practitioner in Early Modern England', in The Task of Healing: Medicine, Religion and Gender in England and the Netherlands 1450-1800, ed. H. Marland and M. Pelling (Erasmus, Rotterdam, 1996), pp. 101-33

‘The Body's Extremities: Feet, Gender, and the Iconography of Healing in Seventeenth-Century Sources', in The Task of Healing (as above), pp. 221-51

‘Apprenticeship, Health, and Social Cohesion in Early Modern London', History Workshop Journal, 37(1994), 33-56

‘Epidemics in Nineteenth‑Century Towns: How Important was Cholera?', Twelfth Henry Cohen History of Medicine Lecture, Liverpool Medical Institution, Transactions and Report (1983‑4), pp. 23‑33

(with C. Webster) `Medical Practitioners', in Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century, ed. C. Webster (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1979), pp. 165‑235

Cholera, Fever and English Medicine, 1825-1865, Oxford Historical Monograph Series (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1978)