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

Dr Alysa Levene
Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History
Research
• Child health, welfare and mortality
• Poverty and illegitimacy in the eighteenth century
• Pauper apprenticeship
• Child abandonment in early modern Europe
Dr Levene’s research focuses on the health and welfare of poor children in early modern
Europe. Her monograph, Childcare, health and mortality at the London Foundling
Hospital, 1741-1800: ‘Left to the mercy of the world’ (Manchester University Press,
2007) is an examination of the survival prospects and rearing of infants abandoned to an
institution in eighteenth-century London. She is currently working on a project analysing
the different ways poor children and their families could access welfare support in early
modern London. Her interests cover wet-nursing, medicine and hospital care,
workhouses, the structure of poor families, and the way that children were treated by
charity and poor law officials.
She has also published on the mortality implications of poverty and illegitimacy among
poor infants in London, on pauper apprenticeship, and on the history of poverty in the
eighteenth century.
Editorships
Member of Local Population Studies editorial board, and book reviews editor since
January 2008.
Publications
‘Between less eligibility and the NHS: the changing
place of poor law hospitals in England and Wales,
1929-1939’, Twentieth Century British History, 20
(2009), 322-345.
‘Honesty, sobriety and diligence’: master-apprentice
relations in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
England’, Social History, 33, 2 (2008), 183-200.
‘Children, childhood and the workhouse: St
Marylebone, 1769-81’, London Journal 33, 1 (2008),
37-55.
Levene, Childcare, Health and Mortality at the
London Foundling Hospital, 1741-1800: ‘Left to the
Mercy of the World’ (Manchester University Press,
2007).
‘Can you catch smallpox from hospital records?
Avoiding the plague in archives on health’, Society
of Archivists newsletter, (June 2007).
22