Dr Philippa Carter

I am a historian of medicine and the body, with interests which span Europe, the British Isles, and the Atlantic world between the fifteenth and the early eighteenth centuries. My work engages with premodern Aristotelian understandings of ‘nature’, and particularly in the processes of ‘generation’ and ‘corruption’.

I teach on Early Science and Medicine at the Department of HPS. I am currently working on a first monograph, provisionally entitled Frenzy: Brain Disease and the Soul in Early Modern England.

My first article, ‘Childbirth, “Madness”, and Bodies in History’ was published in History Workshop Journal in Spring 2021. A companion outreach article entitled ‘Losing Minds’ – reflecting on understandings of postpartum maternal illness, past and present – was published in History Workshop Online in August 2021.