Research

The Oxford Centre for the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology (OCHSMT) brings together research on the history of science, medicine, technology, and the environment across the University of Oxford.  Housed in the History Faculty, we are uniquely broad in our chronological and geographical expertise.  We cover HSMT from the ancient world to the modern era, and do so on a global scale.  We have particular expertise in the history of global and colonial medicine, the global history of disease ecologies, and in the history of science and technology from 1500 to 1900; we also include the world-renowned History of Science Museum. Oxford HSMT draws upon expertise in ancient science, medicine, and technology; medieval natural philosophy and astronomy; early modern and Enlightenment science; the history of chemistry; the history of scientific instruments; historical interactions between religion and science; evolutionary and Malthusian theory; scientific racism and eugenics; accounts of mental illness in a comparative perspective; the history of epidemics; science in the Islamic world; environmental and climate history; the global history of knowledge of the natural world; medicine and war; and the nature of innovation in the modern medical sciences.  Our research probes the notion of knowledge itself alongside the concept of nature, analysing how we have defined types and categories of knowledge and the historical processes that underlie knowledge formation of the natural world.