Professor Mark Jackson BSc, MB BS, PhD

Extension: 3003

Telephone: 01392 263003

Professor of History, Director of Centre for Medical History

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 am currently writing a monograph on the history of stress, entitled The Age of Stress: Science and the Search for Stability, and am editing the Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine. 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, schools, and so on). In recent years, I have served as a member (2000-3) and chair (2003-8) of the Wellcome Trust History of Medicine Funding Committee, as a member (2003-8) and chair (2008-) of the Wellcome Trust Research Resources in Medical History Funding Committee, and as a member of the Wellcome Trust Public Engagement and Medical Humanities Strategy Committees.