Dr James Bradley
Lecturer in the history of medicine / life sciences in the Centre for Health and Society (CHS) and the History and Philosophy of Science (HPS)
Dr James Bradley went to the University of Edinburgh to study history and there obtained my MA (1986) and PhD ("Cricket, Class and Colonialism", 1991). He subsequently took a Graduate Diploma in computing - "Logic, Text and Artificial Intelligence: IT for the Humanities" - at the University of Dundee (1993). Dr Bradley spent ten years as a researcher at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, Glasgow University, where he not only deployed many of the techniques that he had discovered at Dundee, but also developed a deep love of and enthusiasm for the History of Medicine, particularly the fraught relationship between medical theory and practice, whilst pursuing other interests, especially the history of tattooing.
Research Interests
Dr Bradley's interests range across several fields, including: the history of medicine, particularly the role of therapy in the creation of medical identities and the history of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM); the history of the body, including tattooing, the body as a site for punishment and the body in sickness and in health; convict transportation to Australia; sport and colonialism; and the way that we deploy technology to interrogate historiographical problems.
Current projects include
- Chief Investigator on ARC-funded project: "Founders and Survivors: Tasmanian Lifecourses in Historical Context"
- History of the medical profession in Melbourne and Victoria
- "Herbert Mayo's unfortunate life": biography of London surgeon (fl. 1826-1852)—disputed discoverer of the motor functions of the trigeminal nerve and outcast from society
- "Law and Disorder in Colonial New South Wales": biography of Henry Croasdaile Wilson, ex–freedom fighter/mercenary, allegedly corrupt Chief Police Magistrate of Sydney in the 1830s and outcast from society
- "The Sick Man Thesis and the persistence of holism in modern medicine": how the "Birth of the Clinic" thesis has distorted our understanding of what medical practitioners do and think.
- Data mining of historical sources
Contact Details
Rm 2.12
Level 2, 221 Bouverie Street,
University of Melbourne Vic. 3010
T: +61 3 8344 3851
F: +61 3 8344 0824
E: jbradley@unimelb.edu.au
Teaching and Supervision
Centre for Health and Society (CHS), lecture and co-ordinator:
- Health Practice 2
History and Philosophy of Science lecture and co-ordinator:
- Minds and Madness;
- Darwinism;
- Medicine Biology and Culture.
Breadth and IDF:
- Knowing Nature.
- Currently involved in team developing breadth course Drugs that changed the world
I am willing to supervise students in any area relating to the history of disease and medicine, the body, discipline and punishment, colonial Australian historiography, and Historical Information Science.