PhD Bursaries - History of child health
Research opportunity in 19th and early 20th century
British children's hospitals and child health
PhD Bursaries available from Faculty of Arts and Social
Sciences at Kingston University
Deadline: 15 June 2012
Kingston University has announced it is making 14
fees-only PhD bursaries available across arrange of subject areas within the
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, including History.
Over the last ten years, the History Department at
Kingston has been constructing a series of databases created from admission
registers to four children's hospitals in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
One of the objectives of building the databases was to encourage academic work
on these sources by developing a series of questions such sources could be used
to investigate. The databases provide
information on nearly 120,000 individual patients including age, sex, admission
details, original diagnosis, length of stay in hospital and outcome of stay.
Some also contain information on treatment received and family background (eg
fathers' occupations and religion). They can be linked in the case of Great
Ormond Street Hospital and the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, Glasgow to
surviving case notes which provide more detail on both treatment and patient
background. Together these sources provide a unique insight into the care (and
living conditions) of poor sick children at a time when the speciality of
paediatrics was only just beginning to emerge.
Kingston History Department would be interested in
offering advice and support to anyone who would like to make these databases
the central resource in a PhD project, and particularly anyone who would be
interested applying for one of the bursaries. We cannot guarantee success, as
the bursaries are offered in open competition across the Faculty, but we would
be keen to encourage and support any such application.
Further information about the awards can be found at this
link:
Further information on the children's hospital project
and the databases themselves can be found on our dedicated public website www.hharp.org<http://www.hharp.org>
(access is free).
If you would like to talk through an idea for a research
proposal please feel free to contact Dr Sue Hawkins (s.e.hawkins@kingston.ac.uk<mailto:s.e.hawkins@kingston.ac.uk>).
Dr Sue Hawkins
Lecturer, History Department, Kingston University Project
manager: Historic Hospital Admission Records Project