Medical Humanities Research Centre (MHRC)

The Medical Humanities Research Centre (MHRC) fosters research across the field of medical humanities.

The Medical Humanities Research Centre (MHRC) at Swansea University fosters multidisciplinary research across faculties and institutions in the field of the medical humanities. Co-directed by Dr Laura Kalas (English Literature) and Dr Michael Bresalier (History), the centre is interested in the intersections of research into health, wellbeing, illness, disease, culture, literature and history. Cross-fertilising the disciplines of the humanities, medicine, health, science, and art, our research explores the most urgent challenges facing human health and wellbeing across the globe.  

The MHRC research themes include:
Resilience in health and illness Women’s Health Disability, trauma and the body Power, knowledge and healthcare Patients, professionals and narratives Gender and sexuality Health, disease and the natural world Global perspectives on medicine, health, and disease

The MHRC research themes include:

Resilience in health and illness

Women’s Health

Disability, trauma and the body

Power, knowledge and healthcare

Patients, professionals and narratives

Gender and sexuality

Health, disease and the natural world

Global perspectives on medicine, health, and disease

Projects

Ageing on Screen

Ageing on Screen After #MeToo: gender, age, celebrity (2023-4)

This project (PI Lisa Smithstead) explores the representation of ageing and older women in British and American cinema in the wake #MeToo and #TimesUp – movements that have changed the discourse around women and film culture in a major way from 2017 onwards. It interrogates how these movements have impacted the way women’s experiences of ageing and older female characters are represented in cinema, their reception by ageing audiences, and the cultures of production behind the scenes which are shaping new discourses of age and gender. The project illuminates where – and in what forms – ageing and older female characters appear in the movies that have been most visible on UK and US cinema screens across recent years. Showcasing a range of innovative case studies considering age and genre, representation of ageing and dementia, and hands on work with ageing audiences, the project paints a new picture of ageing women in popular film culture to discern what a better and brighter future for ageing and older women on screen might look like.

Epistemic Injustice in Healthcare “One Health” in the United Nations ‘Resilience, challenge and change: Learning from nurses' Screening Dementia Women’s Health

People

Co-director

Dr Michael Bresalier is a historian of modern medicine, with expertise in the social, cultural, economic and political dimensions of health and disease. Dr Bresalier organises workshops, seminars and conferences on core research themes, including resilience in healthcare and health, disease, and the natural world.

Dr Michael Bresalier

Co-director

Dr Laura Kalas is a Senior Lecturer and specialist in medieval women’s literature. She is particularly interested in research that crosses disciplines, and the ways in which medieval medical discourse offers a useful lens through which to consider bodily, sensory and spiritual representations.

Dr Laura Kalas

Staff Members

David Turner (History)

Owen Sheers (Creative Writing)

Sarah Wydall (Criminology)

Helen Yu (Business)

Ryan Sweet (English Literature)

Lisa Smithstead (Film Studies)

Tess Fitzpatrick (Applied Linguistics)

Alexia Bowler (Applied Linguistics)

Richard Fern (Media)

Alison Williams (Modern Languages)

Kirsti Bohata (English Literature)

Mel Kohlke (English Literature)
Sarah Crook (History)

Christoph Laucht (History)

Rowena Jenkins (Medical School)

Hugh Upton (Health Care Law and Ethics)

Caroline Jones (Health Care Law and Ethics)

David Britton (Creative Writing)
Francesca Rhydderch (Creative Writing)

Chris Pak (English Literature)

Clive Weston (Medical School)

Brigid Haines (Modern Languages)

Alan Bilton (Creative Writing)

Roberta Magnani (English Literature)

Gemma Almond

Emeritus Members:

Liz Herbert McAvoy (English Literature)
Trish Skinner (History)

Honorary Research Associates:

Theresa Tyers (Medical History / English Literature)

Academic Publications

Dr Laura Kalas

*Title*	Description
Margery Kempe’s Spiritual Medicine: Suffering, Transformation and the Life-Course (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2020)	The first full-length medical humanities study of the medieval visionary woman, Margery Kempe, structured around the life-course. This monograph explores the medicalised and embodied features of Kempe’s spirituality, arguing for her active engagement in such discourses and her gendered operations as a ‘pain surrogate’.
‘The Swetenesse of Confection: A Recipe for Spiritual Health in London, British Library, Additional MS 61823, The Book of Margery Kempe’, Studies in the Ages of Chaucer, 40 (2018), 155-90.	This article reveals new archival material in the form of a faded recipe from the medieval manuscript of The Book of Margery Kempe. The recipe is transcribed for the first time, using multispectral imaging technology. The article uses the recipe contents, as medicinal comfits, as a metaphor for Kempe’s ‘confection’ with God, in the context of medieval devotional and sensory notions of sweetness and healing.
'Foreword' to Journal Special Issue: 'Gender, Science, and the Natural World: Essays on Medieval Literature from the 2020 Gender and Medieval Studies Conference', ed. Linda Mitchell and Daisy Black, Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality, 58:1 (2022), 7-9	This special issue journal edition arose from the 2020 conference at Swansea University organised by Dr Laura Kalas on ‘Gender, Science, and the Natural World’. Another publication generated from the conference is Gender and the 'Natural' Environment in the Middle Ages, ed. Patricia Skinner and Theresa Tyers (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2023), for which Dr Kalas also wrote the Foreword.
‘Embodying Medieval Holy Women: Science, Technology and Medicine’, in Women in Christianity in the Medieval Age, 1000-1500, ed. by Laura Kalas and Roberta Magnani (London and New York: Routledge, forthcoming)	This chapter, from a collection of essays also co-edited by Laura Kalas, explores the ways in which women’s bodies were conceived of, written, and adapted in the Middle Ages.

Dr Michael Bresalier

*Title*	Description
Modern Flu: British Medical Science and the Viralisation of Influenza, 1890-1950 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).	The first systematic study of the framing of influenza as a viral disease and how virological knowledge re-shaped medical, epidemiological, and public health policies and practices through the early twentieth century.
Animals and the Shaping of Modern Medicine: One Health and its Histories (Palgrave 2018) with A. Woods, A. Cassidy, R. Mason Dentinger.	This book breaks new ground by situating animals and their diseases at the very heart of modern medicine. In demonstrating their historical significance as subjects and shapers of medicine, it offers important insights into past animal lives, and reveals that what we think of as ‘human’ medicine was in fact deeply zoological.
‘From healthy cows to healthy humans: Integrated approaches to world hunger, 1930-65’, in A. Woods, M. Bresalier, A. Cassidy and R. Mason Dentinger Animals and the Shaping of Modern Medicine: One Health and its Histories (Palgrave, 2018)	This chapter examines how diseased and undernourished dairy cattle came to be perceived as both the cause of and solution to hunger in the “developing world”. It explores how nutritional science and veterinary medicine were mobilised to address the world food crisis and, in the process, connected human and bovine bodies. Enrolled by the United Nations and its agencies in campaigns against hunger and malnutrition, cows were the focus new health structures to improve their productivity. Experts in human and veterinary medicine and agricultural science came together to plan and organise interventions that would create new bovine bodies and new experts to support their role in improving human health and nutrition.

Dr Lisa Smithstead

*Title*	Description
Smithstead, L. (2022). ‘There’s more to middle age than a saggy belly’: gender, ageing, and agency in Kate Winslet’s post Weinstein star image. Celebrity Studies, https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2022.2157296

Professor Owen Sheers

*Title*	Description
To Provide All People, a film-poem to mark the 70th anniversary of the NHS, broadcast on the BBC in 2018.	This film-poem , starring Michael Sheen, Tamsin Grieg, Martin Freeman and Meera Syal, was a landmark television drama commissioned to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the NHS. It charts the emotional and philosophical map of what defines the NHS and the personal experiences that lie at the heart of the service; from patients to surgeons, porters to midwives.
he Two Worlds of Charlie F, a play about wounded and injured service personnel (2012)	The Two Worlds of Charlie F is a play written by Owen Sheers and directed by Stephen Rayne, based upon the experiences of wounded and injured service personnel who also make up the majority of the cast. The play, produced by Alice Driver of Masterclass theatre for the Theatre Royal Haymarket, was funded by the Royal British Legion. A BBC One Imagine special about the making of the play was broadcast in June 2012. In the summer of 2012, The Bravo 22 Company toured the production of The Two Worlds of Charlie F to various theatres across the UK. Bravo 22 Company’s The Two Worlds of Charlie F, won the 2012 Amnesty International prestigious Freedom of Expression Award at the Edinburgh Fringe.

Dr Ryan Sweet

*Title*	Description
“Toothy Tales: Dentures in the Writings of H. Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling.” Cultures of Oral Health, edited by Barry J. Gibson and Claire L. Jones, Routledge, 2022, pp. 83–95.	This essay investigates the rich use of false teeth users in the late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century works of H. Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling. It argues that Haggard’s and Kipling’s works provided metonymic commentaries on the fit and functionality of false teeth while utilising their symbolic flexibility as devices to perform a variety of roles, stimulating comedy, personal reflection, social commentary, and grotesque intrigue.
Prosthetic Body Parts in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.	This open-access book investigates imaginaries of artificial limbs, eyes, hair, and teeth in British and American literary and cultural sources from the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Prosthetic Body Parts in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture shows how depictions of prostheses complicated the contemporary bodily status quo, which increasingly demanded an appearance of physical wholeness.
“Physical ‘Wholeness’ and ‘Incompleteness’ in Victorian Prosthesis Narratives.” Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Clark Lawlor and Andrew Mangham, Cambridge University Press, 2021, pp. 230–246.	This essay investigates how and why physical "wholeness" became culturally dominant in the nineteenth century, and how literary representations of prosthetics engaged with this hegemony. Using two fictional case studies that represent artificial-hand users, English poet, novelist, and playwright Robert Williams Buchanan’s "Lady Letitia’s Lilliput Hand" (1862) and the lesser-known short-story writer T. Lockhart’s "Prince Rupert’s Emerald Ring" (1895), it argues that literary representations of prostheses often simultaneously reinforced and complicated the hegemony of physical "completeness".
“Pirates and Prosthetics: Manly Messages for Managing Limb Loss in Victorian and Edwardian Adventure Narratives.” The Victorian Male Body: The Diverse Embodiment of White Masculinity in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Joanne Parsons and Ruth Heholt, Edinburgh University Press, 2018, pp. 87–107.	This essay investigates the common cultural association of pirates and prosthetics. In tracing the literary roots of this association, it argues that famous nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imaginaries of amputee pirates, such as Long John Silver from Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (1881-82) and Captain Hook from Peter Pan (1904), presented these characters as hypermasculine disabled role models within a culture that privileged a "never-say-die" attitude.
“‘Get the best article in the market’: Prostheses for Women in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Commerce.” Rethinking Modern Histories of Prostheses in Anglo-American Commodity Cultures, 1850–1960, edited by Claire L. Jones, Manchester University Press, 2017,pp. 114–136.	This essay demonstrates how fictional writing was a key component of nineteenth-century prostheses discourse, a constituent that provided practical advice for its readers on the kinds of prostheses that should be avoided for both social and functional purposes. It also explores the explicitly gendered messages about prosthesis type and use communicated via both advertising and literary writing.

Dr Helen Yu

*Title*	Description
Yu, H. (2016). Redefining Responsible Research and Innovation for the Advancement of Biobanking and Biomedical Research, OXFORD JOURNAL OF LAW AND BIOSCIENCES, 3(3), 611-635
Yu H. (2018). The European Open Science Cloud and Commercialization, NATURE BIOTECHNOLOGY, 36, 1133-1134
Gerke, S., Minssen, T., Yu, H. and Cohen, I.G. (2019). A Smart Pill to Swallow: Ingestible Electronic Sensors, Cutting Edge Medicine, and Their Legal and Ethical Issues, NATURE ELECTRONICS, 1-6
Yu, H. (2021). Digital Health Technologies Under the New EU Medical Devices Regulation: Monitoring and Governing Intended vs Actual Use, BMJ INNOVATIONS, 7, 637-641
Yu, H. (2021). Responsible Use of Negative Research Outcomes – Accelerating the Discovery and Development of New Antibiotics, NATURE JOURNAL OF ANTIBIOTICS, 1-4

PhD students that have participated in MHRC:

PhD Student	Topic Title	Synopsis
Geraldine Gnych	Gender, Authority and the Mouth in Western Medieval Culture, 1100-1500	This thesis aims to uncover the ways in which the mouth can be used to demonstrate or undermine authority, and how aspects of gendering can influence the way in which the human mouth is presented and used in medieval culture. This thesis focuses on Western Europe between 1100 and 1500, taking into account source material from across difference discourses, including the religious, medical, literary, artistic and philosophical. The thesis follows its investigation through speech, beauty, monstrosity, healing and singing. Supervisors: Dr Laura Kalas and Professor David Turner
Megan Blackford	‘Pandemic Preparedness in Neoliberal Britain, 1980-2009’.	A log-term historical study of pandemic preparedness policies and planning from the emergence of HIV/AIDS to the 2009 “Swine” influenza pandemic. Supervisor: Dr Michael Bresalier
Milo Coffey	(ESRC DTP Studentship), Investigating lay understanding of medical terminology	This study will enhance understanding of the extent to which lay people can comprehend medical terms, and will investigate which factors are important in determining this. Previous studies have addressed the former issue, but few have addressed the latter. This may be because much of the existing literature has been carried out from a medical perspective rather than a linguistic one. This study will combine established methods for assessing lay understanding of medical terms with novel ones drawing on current research in lexical semantics. The aim is to reduce misunderstanding in medical communication and improve patients’ understanding of their conditions and treatments, in turn leading to enhanced outcomes. Supervisors: Dr Tess Fitzpatrick and Dr Alexia Bowler

PhD Student

Topic Title

Synopsis

Geraldine Gnych

Gender, Authority and the Mouth in Western Medieval Culture, 1100-1500

This thesis aims to uncover the ways in which the mouth can be used to demonstrate or undermine authority, and how aspects of gendering can influence the way in which the human mouth is presented and used in medieval culture. This thesis focuses on Western Europe between 1100 and 1500, taking into account source material from across difference discourses, including the religious, medical, literary, artistic and philosophical. The thesis follows its investigation through speech, beauty, monstrosity, healing and singing.

Supervisors: Dr Laura Kalas and Professor David Turner

Megan Blackford

‘Pandemic Preparedness in Neoliberal Britain, 1980-2009’.

A log-term historical study of pandemic preparedness policies and planning from the emergence of HIV/AIDS to the 2009 “Swine” influenza pandemic.

Supervisor: Dr Michael Bresalier

Milo Coffey

(ESRC DTP Studentship), Investigating lay understanding of medical terminology

This study will enhance understanding of the extent to which lay people can comprehend medical terms, and will investigate which factors are important in determining this. Previous studies have addressed the former issue, but few have addressed the latter. This may be because much of the existing literature has been carried out from a medical perspective rather than a linguistic one. This study will combine established methods for assessing lay understanding of medical terms with novel ones drawing on current research in lexical semantics. The aim is to reduce misunderstanding in medical communication and improve patients’ understanding of their conditions and treatments, in turn leading to enhanced outcomes.

Supervisors: Dr Tess Fitzpatrick and Dr Alexia Bowler

Our Latest News and Events

Exploring medico-cultural concepts of beauty for BBC Radio Wales’ The Idea

In March 2023 the MHRC co-sponsored a public talk by Dr Laura Kalas entitled ‘Weaponising Beauty in the Middle Ages and Now’. The talk explored ideas about beauty, wellbeing and violence, in association with BBC Radio Wales’ programme The Idea, and was broadcast in April 2023. It was followed by an article by Laura Kalas in The Conversation, which explored similar ideas about modern and medieval attitudes to beauty standards and wellbeing.

More information: https://theconversation.com/beauty-ideals-were-as-tough-in-the-middle-ages-as-they-are-now-203751

Michael Bresalier’s new book!

Modern Flu: British Medical Science and the Viralization of Influenza, 1890-1950 This is the first systematic history of how influenza was framed as a viral disease and how virological ways of knowing reshaped approaches to controlling the disease through the twentieth century.

More information: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/978-1-137-33954-6

Expert set to investigate history of TB vaccinations as part of major healthcare research project

A Swansea University historian will play a key role in a new research project which aims to use humanities and social science expertise to help bring patient voices into healthcare research and practice.

The six-year interdisciplinary project, which has been awarded a grant of £2.8 million by the Wellcome Trust, will see Dr Michael Bresalier, from the Department of History, Heritage and Classics, partner with academics in Britain and Italy.

Awards and Grants

Wellcome Trust grant (£2.8 million) for Epistemic Injustice in Healthcare (EPIC)

This partnership between researchers at Swansea, Bristol, Nottingham, Birmingham and the universities of Ferrara and Bologna studies how disparities in healthcare knowledge affect health experiences, wellbeing, and outcomes. Epistemic injustice is a framework for examining how differences in the knowledge people possess or communicate in negotiating health or illness (including vaccination) can be affected by their class-background, gender, ethnicity, and so forth, and can impact healthcare decisions and outcomes. For example, some patients and communities have reported that their testimonies and perspectives are ignored, dismissed, or explained away by the healthcare profession. These experiences can be classified as ‘epistemic injustices’ because, in certain cases, they are based on prejudice and can jeopardise patient care and undermine trust in healthcare staff and systems.

http://epicproject.org.uk/

Central European Advanced Therapy and Immunology Centre

Dr Helen Yu is a strategic partner PI on law, policy, and strategic management of an international and interdisciplinary centre of excellence project funded by Horizon Europe, entitled Central European Advanced Therapy and Immunology Centre, including partners from Masaryk University School of Medicine, Leipzig University Institute of Immunology, Fraunhofer Institute for Cell Therapy and Immunology, and Copenhagen University Faculty of Law.

Grant total: EUR 15 million

Towards better computational approaches and responsible innovation strategies in early drug discovery

Dr Helen Yu is PI on the Responsible Research and Innovation aspect of an interdisciplinary four year project, funded by Research Council of Norway, BIOTEK 2021 Programme, Centre for Digital Life Norway, entitled Towards better computational approaches and responsible innovation strategies in early drug discovery – application to antibiotics and COPD.

Grant total: NOK 20 million

Collaborative Research Program in Biomedical Innovation Law

Dr Helen Yu is the researcher and Associate Director responsible for managing a four-year international research project funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation, entitled Collaborative Research Program in Biomedical Innovation Law on the legal and ethical challenges of transforming biomedical discoveries into innovations. Partners included Petrie-Flom Centre at Harvard Law School; the Program on Regulation, Therapeutics, and Law at Harvard Medical School; Centre for Law, Medicine and Life Sciences at the University of Cambridge; University of Michigan Law School; the Department of Food and Resource Economics at the University of Copenhagen; and the Faculty of Law at the University of Copenhagen

Grant total: DKK 35 million

Maternal And Pregnancy Health and Elevated Heat (MAGENTA): Wellcome Trust (£2.2m over three years)

Magenta is a trans-disciplinary data-linkage and biological sampling project looking at the effects of climate change – particularly heat-waves –on maternal health in deprived UK communities. It mirrors a number of other studies in other countries. As a humanities and social sciences scholar specialising in media and public relations, Dr Richard Fern is looking at how people – parents in this case – can be empowered to act in the public sphere. Dr Fern’s research impact is aimed at first measuring the level of involvement in political discourse on climate change, and then developing a series of workshops which will give attendees the skills to speak to the politicians, news-media, power elites and other actors in the public sphere. We are working with a number of groups such as midwives, fellow scholars at UCL, community groups and the Wellcome Trust.

Inclusive Board Game Project: AHRC Impact Acceleration

Dr Ryan Sweet's AHRC Impact Acceleration Account-funded "Inclusive Board Game Project" (August 2023-August 2024) aims to create an inclusive board game inspired by the findings of his 2022 book Prosthetic Body Parts in Nineteenth-Century and Culture. A second aim of the project is to create a set of accessibility guidelines for board games designers and publishers. To achieve these aims, Dr Sweet is collaborating with the games company Focus Games Ltd. and a focus group comprising members of the disabled community (including individuals identified via Disability Arts Cymru and the Amputation Foundation).

PhD CDP4 studentship funding from the AHRC

A collaborative supervisory team, comprising Professor David Turner and Dr Ryan Sweet from Swansea University and Manon Foster Evans and Lorena Troughton from the National Library of Wales, has secured full PhD CDP4 studentship funding from the AHRC for a project entitled "Arts, Activism, and Accessibility: Disability Arts in Wales, 1980–Present". The studentship will be advertised in late spring 2024, and the successful candidate will start in September 2024.

RWIF funded (£14,924): Healthcare communication and health literacy (2021)

The project’s broad aim was to address well-being and health confidence, and to promote efficient and appropriate engagement with statutory healthcare services. Specifically, the project examined approaches to health communication and literacy, through increasing effectiveness of written and spoken communication in over-stretched outpatient services. The project team worked with medical professionals to scrutinise and revise health communication including

Written communication: focus on patient information distributed from Minor Injuries Unit, Neath Port Talbot Hospital; assessment of general public understanding and interpretation of information (builds on placement project work by Rabin and Davies, 2019)

Spoken communication: focus on words and phrases used in cancer consultations; identification of words and phrases carrying high risk of mis-interpretation (builds on pilot data collection by Fitzpatrick, 2018)

Medical Humanities Research Centre (MHRC)

The Medical Humanities Research Centre (MHRC) fosters research across the field of medical humanities.

Projects

People

Co-director

Co-director

Academic Publications

PhD students that have participated in MHRC:

Our Latest News and Events

Awards and Grants

Contact Medical Humanities Research Centre (MHRC)

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