Dr Alun Withey

I am a senior lecturer in History, based in the Centre for Medical History, and recently completed a major research project 'Do Beards Matter?: Facial Hair, Health and Hygiene in Britain, 1700-1918', funded by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Wellcome Trust. My new book Concerning Beards: Facial Hair, Health and Practice in Britain, 1650-1900 was published in early 2021 with Bloomsbury, and have also edited an essay collection, published in 2017 by Palgrave, on the history of facial hair.

More broadly I am an expert in early modern medical history, and my research interests include domestic medicine, and especially medical remedy collections, the medical marketplace and medical advertising, gender and the sick role, and the lived experience of sickness in early modern Britain. My book, 'Physick and the Family: Health, medicine and care in Wales c. 1600-1750 (MUP, 2012) was awarded the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health (EAHMH) book prize.

I am also interested in the interplay between technology and culture in the long eighteenth century, and the increasing market for products to shape the body. My monograph 'Technology, Self-Fashioning and Politeness in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Refined Bodies' was published by Palgrave Macmillan in December 2015.

My new research project focusses on the history of travel preparations by British travellers, c. 1750-1914, encompassing themes such as the travelling body, health and hygiene, comfort and psychological health, material culture, risk, technology and transport

Biography:

After a rather unsatisfying ten-year career with a major high street bank, I decided to take the plunge and return to study. Having begun studying for my history degree part-time with the Open University, I enrolled at the University of Glamorgan and completed my BA (Hons) there in 2005, writing my undergraduate dissertation on the medical information within a seventeenth-century commonplace book.

Having secured funding from the AHRC, I completed my MA in History at Cardiff University in 2006, and was then funded by a Wellcome Trust prize studentship to study my PhD at Swansea University, which I completed in 2009. My thesis was adapted into my first book "Physick and the Family: Health, medicine and care in Wales, c. 1600-1750", published in 2011 by Manchester University Press.

After completing my doctorate I returned to the University of Glamorgan in 2010, as a research fellow on the Leverhulme Trust-funded project "Steel in Britain in the Age of Enlightenment", working with Professor Chris Evans. At the completion of this project, I became a lecturer in History at Swansea University, teaching a range of modules in early modern European history.

Research supervision:

I am very keen to supervise PhD topics within my area of expertise, and am always delighted to chat over possible ideas. In the first instance please send a copy of your CV, and a 500-word outline of your project idea.

The work of my postgraduate research students covers a wide range of topics. I am currently supervising PhD candidates working on the history of Jacobite masculinities, and also living standards in industrial communities in Northern England.

I am very happy to consider requests for supervision in any aspect of early modern medical history, and also in early modern and eighteenth-century history more broadly. I am especially happy to consider working with candidates with interest in the following areas, c. 1600--1800:

Remedies and remedy culture

household and domestic medicine

medical practice/practitioners and care

the body and its relationship with technology

medical advertising; masculinity and the male body

advertising and consumption;

material culture

probate inventories

History of Travel 

Key Recent Publications

¨     Concerning Beards: Facial Hair, Health and Practice in England, c.1650-1900 (London: Bloomsbury, 2021)

¨     (Co-Edited with Jennifer Evans) New Perspectives on the History of Facial Hair (London: Palgrave, 2018).

¨     Technology, Self-Fashioning and Politeness in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Refined Bodies (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015).

¨     Physick and the Family: Health, Medicine and Care in Early Modern Wales (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011)

¨     [co-authored with Dr Gábor Gelléri] ‘The Art of Travelling in Good Health: Assessing and Addressing the Risks of Mobility in Early Modern Europe’, Viatica, 10:2023, 1-20

¨     'Hairy honours of their chins': whiskers and masculinity in early nineteenth-century Britain', Social History 47:4 (2022) 395-418

¨     'Enabling Politeness: Perfumers and Male Self-Fashioning in Britain, c. 1750–1800', Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (open access), 2022

¨     ‘Medical Practitioners in Early Modern Wrexham and Cardiff’, Welsh History Review 29:2 (2018), 168-195.

¨     ‘Medicine and Charity in Eighteenth-Century Northumberland: The early years of the Bamburgh Castle Dispensary and Infirmary, c. 1772-1802’, Social History of Medicine, 29:3 (2016), 467-89.

¨     [co-authored with David M. Turner] ‘Technologies of the Body: Polite Consumption and the Correction of Deformity in Eighteenth-Century England’, History, 99:338 (2014), 775-968.

¨     ‘A National Health Service’, History Today, 63:10 (October 2013), pp. 23-29

¨     Shaving and Masculinity in Enlightenment Britain’, Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, 36:2 (2013), 225-247.

¨     [co-authored with Chris Evans] ‘An Enlightenment in Steel?’, Technology and Culture, 53:3 (July 2012), 533-560.

¨      ‘“Persons that live remote from London”: Apothecaries and the Rural Medical Marketplace in Early Modern Wales’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine (USA) 85:2 (2011), 222-247.

Membership of Official/Professional Bodies

• Aspire Fellow
• Fellow of the Higher Education Authority
• Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
• Society for the Social History of Medicine – Member
• History of Medicine Society of Wales - Member