Dr Catherine Crawford

Biography

I went into History because of the life-changing intellectual excitement I experienced in my first year of a liberal arts degree at the University of British Columbia. I found that historical understanding was the most satisfying kind. I loved that you can study almost anything as a historian. After my BA I came to the UK to do an interdisciplinary master's in 'History and Social Studies of Science' at Sussex, followed by a doctorate at Oxford on the history of forensic medicine. I taught at the University of Leeds and was a research fellow at the Wellcome Collection in London before coming to Essex. I am interested in how ideas about the world get created and legitimised. My research has been broadly concerned with the construction of medical authority in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I co-edited a collection of essays on Legal Medicine in History (1994), and have published articles on Enlightenment medicine, doctor-patient disputes, and the comparative history of forensic medicine in different legal cultures.