Dr Coreen McGuire
Historian doing interdisciplinary research at the nexus between disability history, medical history, and science and technology studies.
Measurements, and their manipulation, have been underestimated as crucial historical forces motivating and guiding the way we think about disability. Using measurement technology as a lens, this book draws together several existing discussions on disability, phenomenology, healthcare, medical practice, big data, embodiment, and emerging medical and scientific technologies around the turn of the twentieth century. These are popular topics of scholarly attention but have not, until now, been considered as interconnected topics within a single book. As such, this work connects several important, and usually separate academic subject areas and historical specialisms. The standards embedded in instrumentation created strict, but, ultimately arbitrary thresholds of normalcy and abnormalcy. Considering these standards from a long historical perspective reveals how these dividing lines shifted when pushed.
Chaired by Prof Jane Macnaughton, this event featured presentations from Life of Breath researchers (Prof Havi Carel, Dr James Dodd, Dr Alice Malpass, Dr Coreen McGuire, Prof Corinne Saunders) drawing on a range of different perspectives, including the lived experience of breathlessness, patient perceptions of healthcare, concepts of ‘normal’ and historical ideas about the connections between mind and body.
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