Professor Mark Jackson
Biography
I am currently Professor of the History of Medicine and Director of the Centre for Medical History at the University of Exeter. After qualifying in both immunology in 1982 and medicine in 1985, I pursued research on the social history of infanticide and the history of `feeble-mindedness' at the Universities of Leeds and Manchester. More recently, I have been researching and writing on the history of allergic diseases, such as asthma, hayfever and eczema, in the modern world, and on the history of stress. My publications include New-Born Child Murder: Women, Illegitimacy and the Courts in Eighteenth-Century England (1996), The Borderland of Imbecility: Medicine, Society and the Fabrication of the Feeble Mind in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain (2000), Allergy: The History of a Modern Malady (2006) and Asthma: The Biography (2009), as well numerous edited volumes and articles. I have a strong interest in developing and expanding the undergraduate medical curriculum and in creating opportunities for wider public engagement activities in radio, television, newspapers and schools. I served as Chair of the Wellcome Trust History of Medicine Funding Committee, 2003-08 (member 2000-03), and am currently Chair of the Trust's Research Resources in Medical History Funding Committee. At the moment, I am editing the Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine (OUP), and writing a monograph on the history of stress, entitled The Age of Stress: Science and the Search for Stability (OUP).
