History for Health: Pasts Repairing Futures

There is increasing recognition that the visual and performative Arts can have positive therapeutic value. Similarly, reading has also been acknowledged as having important calming and healing functions. Yet, despite a growing awareness of the importance of social prescribing, and a more capacious view of how to achieve, and maintain, good health beyond reductionist medical interventions, significantly less attention has been paid to the role History can play as a positive force for health and wellbeing.

This is surprising. History is, a popular outlet for community and individual interest and enjoyment. Whether reading a complex academic history book, visiting a local museum or monument, or watching a historical drama on the television, History is all around us and remains phenomenally popular.

This Work in Progress seminar will examine history under this Health Humanities lens, exploring the multifarious ways history can be mobilised as a force for wellbeing. Both at a personal and community level, history can provide solace and inspiration, or it can act as a spur for health activism, or educational enrichment. Engagement with History helps the lonely meet new friends, provokes long forgotten memories, and encourages people to exercise their limbs, heart, and mind.

Presenter
Professor Anna Greenwood is a historian of modern health. She has written on a variety of topics, including western medicine within the context of British colonial rule and the dissemination of health, hygiene, and pharmacy products throughout the networks of empire and commonwealth. She is additionally an active proponent of the Health Humanities, seeking to look specifically at the way history can be mobilised to improve health and wellbeing.