1 February 2012
Congratulations to Dr John Lee, Senior Lecturer in the Department of English, who is co-investigator on the multi-disciplinary research project ‘A Matter of Life and Death: The History of Medicine in Bristol, past and present’, which has secured a People Award from the Wellcome Trust. The project is based at Arnos Vale Cemetery, one of Bristol’s major Victorian heritage sites, and aims to engage a wide range of audiences with the important contribution that biomedical knowledge and practice has made to our understanding of public health and disease.
Arnos Vale is a great ‘depository’ of Bristol’s social history, with strong links to the histories of public health, sanitation, disease and medical treatment in the city. Using the Cemetery as a primary resource – its landscape, graves and epitaphs, private burial records, archives and historic development – the project explores three main themes: disease and mortality; public health and sanitation; medical pioneers past and present.
The two-year project involves medical practitioners and medical historians from the University, undergraduate students on the BA in Medical Humanities Programme (of which Dr Lee is Director), and pupils and teachers from Ashton Park Secondary School.
The People Awards are part of the Wellcome Trust’s Engaging Science grants programme, which supports public engagement projects investigating biomedical science and its social contexts.
Please contact Dr John Lee for further information.