Centre for Health, Medicine and Society - School of Arts and ...

Professor Waltraud Ernst
Professor in the History of Medicine
Research
History of western science, psychiatry and medicine; inter-relationship between modern
medicine and indigenous healing from the eighteenth to the twentieth century.
Main historical period covered: ca. 1750-2000.
• ‘the body’ and ‘the mind’ in historical, social and cultural context
• Asian medicine, tradition and modernity
• history and culture of alternative medicine in Europe
• history and culture of psychiatry and mental healing
• science, magic and religion in comparative perspective
• historical and cultural constructions of ‘normality’ and ‘abnormality’
• In Professor Ernst’s work on the social history of western medicine and science
ca. 1750 - 2000, she is particularly interested in the inter-relationship between
biomedicine and other paradigms of healing. Applying a multidisciplinary
perspective to research topics and in writing she explores the various dimensions
involved in the construction of what counts as ‘health’, ‘illness’ and
‘medicine/science’ at different times and places: the political/state perspective;
institutions; medical professions and ‘folk’ traditions; the patients’ perspective;
scientific theories and practices; myths, beliefs and representations.
Current Projects
Professor Ernst is completing her
book ‘Mental Illness and
Colonialism. Patients’ Lives and
Discourses of Power During the
Age of British Imperialism in South
Asia, 1800-1947’, which is due to
be published by Manchester
University Press in 2010. She
explores the ways in which the
lives of mentally ill people and
their families were affected by
wider social and political
circumstances during the age of
British imperialism in India and
how their stories in turn reflect the
socio-political context within which
they were set. A close reading of
patients’ cases and their individual
circumstances will be employed.
The intention is to illuminate the
Waltraud Ernst on a visit to an Ayurvedic healing shrine
in India, photographed with a healer and a translator
(August 2009).
relations between the personal, and the social and political, in regard to the main
discourses that engulfed patients and their families.
Professor Ernst is also engaged on a project on ‘Colonial Medicine and Indigenous
Health Practices in Southern and Eastern Princely States of India, ca. 1880-1960’,
funded by a Wellcome Trust International Collaborative Research Initiative grant, with
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