To understand the world we live in, it is crucial to know how it has been shaped by science, technology and medicine. Dr Quirke's specialist teaching focuses on the history of medical knowledge, practice, and associated technologies, while her broader teaching considers the wider socio-economic and political context within which they developed, in particular the expansion of the medical market and the evolution of modern warfare.
Modules taught
Undergraduate
- Medicine and War (3rd Year)
- Brave New Worlds: Evolution and its Discontents, c.1850-2000 (2nd Year)
- History and Documents (2nd Year)
- The Rise of the Modern World (1st Year)
- Medicine and Society, c. 1650-1914 (1st Year)
- Making History: Theory, Methods and Sources (1st Year)
- Work-Based Learning Module (2nd Year)
Postgraduate
- Key Concepts and Mehods in History of Medicine
- Worlds of Risk: Technology, Health and the Environment
- Independent Study Module (Combined History/History of Medicine strand)
- History MA Dissertation (Combined History/History of Medicine strand)
Supervision
PhD supervision
Dr Quirke has supervised a number of projects at both Undergraduate and Postgraduate levels, on various aspects of the history of modern medicine, as well as on the history of the First and Second World Wars.
At PhD level, to date Dr Quirke has supervised to completion three projects, one as Second Supervisor (Jenny Wright, 'Public Health Women Doctors in England, 1974 to 1991: a case study', 2015), two as Director. Both were externally funded, the first by a Wellcome Trust Programme Grant (no 09568/Z/11/A) on which Dr Quirke has been co-investigator (Gilmour-Hamilton, 'A Cohort of One: Oral History and Cancer Research in Britain, 1970-2010', 2016); the second by an AHRC CDA with the Science Museum (Rushmore, 'Uses and Misuses of Chemicals in the British Home, c. 1930s-1980s', 2017).
Dr Quirke is also currently acting as Second Supervisor to another Wellcome Trust-funded PhD scholarship (Jane Freebody, '"What did they do all day?" Patient work, psychiatry and society in France and England, 1900-1940'.
PhD examination
Dr Quirke has acted as internal and external examiner on a number of occasions, in Britain and abroad. Topics examined have included the history of smallpox in 18th-century England; the Association of Parents of Backward Children and the legacy of eugenics in Britain, 1946-1960; the history of antimetabolites and their contribution to a rational approach to chemotherapy, 1935-1955.