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Dr Agnes Arnold-Forster

MSc PhD

Research Fellow

LSHTM
15-17 Tavistock Place
London
WC1H 9SH
United Kingdom

I am a historian of medicine, healthcare, work, and the emotions. I am currently a Research Fellow on Professor Martin Gorsky's strand of the Wellcome Trust Collaborative Award, Border Crossings, looking at the impact of endowed hospital charities on practice and policy in the NHS, 1948-2018.

I recieved my PhD from King's College London in late 2017, and my first book, The Cancer Problem, was published by Oxford University Press in 2021. Since completing my PhD I have worked at UCL, the University of Roehampton, Queen Mary, University of London, and the University of Bristol. Most recently, I was a researcher in the Social Studies of Medicine Department at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

Affiliations

Department of Public Health, Environments and Society
Faculty of Public Health and Policy

Teaching

I have taught courses on the history of public health, chronic disease, disability, gender, and urban space.

At LSHTM I am teaching on the distance learning module, History and Health.

 

Research

I am currently a Research Fellow on Professor Martin Gorsky's strand of the Wellcome Trust Collaborative Award, Border Crossings, looking at the impact of endowed hospital charities on practice and policy in the NHS, 1948-2018. The NHS is famously a state-run health service, yet it has always made space for some charitable activities. These include some of the wealthiest charities in the country. The boundaries between state-run and charitably-run activities have shifted over the decades. What difference do these unusual charitable actors make, and how should policy manage them in the future?

 

I am also currently co-PI on the project Healthy Scepticism. Funded by the Wellcome Trust and King's College London, this multimedia, multidisciplinary project seeks to know and contextualise those who have been placed or placed themselves outside of healthcare's formal limits. Tracking a chronology that stretches from the early twentieth-century dissenters of medical orthodoxy, to the critical, anti-establishment voices of the mid-century, and up to our current crisis, this project offers another way to tell the fraught history of modern medicine and healthcare.

 

As research and engagement fellow on the Wellcome Trust funded project, Surgery & Emotion (2017-2020), I investigated the contemporary history of surgeons' professional identity, wellbeing, and emotional distress. I published articles about nostalgia, grief, resilience, professional identity, and Covid-19. My second monograph, Cold, Hard Steel: The Surgical Stereotype Past & Present, is being published my Manchester University Press in early 2022.


My PhD thesis, and subsequent book, offers the first medical, cultural, and social history of cancer in nineteenth-century Britain. The Cancer Problem (OUP, 2021) argues that it was in the nineteenth century that the disease acquired the unique emotional, symbolic, and politicized status it maintains today.

 

Research Area
Health policy
Health services research
Public health history
Vaccines
Evidence use
Discipline
History
Disease and Health Conditions
Cancer
Country
Canada
United Kingdom
United States of America
Region
European Union
North America

Selected Publications

Ordinary People and the 1979 Royal Commission on the NHS
Arnold-Forster A
2023
Twentieth Century British History
Health, policy and emotion.
Arnold-Forster A; Brown M; Moulds A
2022
Medical humanities
Obstacles to Physicians' Emotional Health - Lessons from History.
Arnold-Forster A; Moses JD; Schotland SV
2022
NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE
The Cancer Problem: Malignancy in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Arnold-Forster A
2021
Gender and Pain in Nineteenth-Century Cancer Care.
Arnold-Forster A
2020
Gender & history
Resilience in surgery.
Arnold-Forster A
2020
The British journal of surgery
Mapmaking and Mapthinking: Cancer as a Problem of Place in Nineteenth-century England.
Arnold-Forster A
2018
Social history of medicine : the journal of the Society for the Social History of Medicine
See more Publications