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Staff Profiles

Dr Vicky Long

Senior Lecturer (20th Century British)

Background

I joined Newcastle University in 2018 following research and lectureship posts at Warwick, Manchester, Northumbria, and Glasgow Caledonian Universities. I’m a historian of modern British history, labour history, disability, and health history. My 2011 monograph, The Rise and Fall of the Health Factory: The Politics of Industrial Health in Britain, 1914-1960, examined the politics underpinning the development of occupational health services in twentieth-century Britain. Destigmatising Mental Illness? Professional Politics and Public Education in Britain, 1870-1970, published in 2014, analysed healthcare professionals' efforts to destigmatise mental illness from the late nineteenth century onwards. Other articles, chapters, and edited books examine post-war mental healthcare, psychiatric deinstitutionalization, the experiences of people with severe and enduring mental health conditions, occupational health history, work and mental health, health, work and gender, and disability history.

I am currently working on two disability history projects. My book project uses spina bifida as a case study to examine how pervasive ableist attitudes shaped medical care for disabled people in late twentieth-century Britain. In the 1960s, significant advances in surgical and medical care transformed open spina bifida from a usually lethal to a frequently survivable condition, while also reducing the extent of impairment experienced by survivors. Yet by the early 1970s, many doctors advocated selective non-treatment, actively treating only the most clinically promising cases and withholding life-sustaining care from most babies born with this condition. Separately, I am starting work on a new research project, funded by an AHRC Curiosity award, which examines how the development of disability rights and children's rights in the post-war era affected attitudes towards and experiences of disabled children. I am working with Down's Syndrome Association, Scope, Shine, and Wellcome Collection to develop this project.

I’m a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and the Royal Historical Society, and serve on the RSE Research Awards Arts & Humanities Sub-Committee review panel and the editorial board for Palgrave’s Mental Health in Historical Perspective book series. I have previously served on the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s Young Academy of Scotland (2014-2018) and the Wellcome Trust Research Resources Committee (2014-2021). I've appeared as an expert contributor on several episodes of Who Do You Think You Are? (Rob Rinder, Alex Scott, Ralf Little, and Emily Attack).

Research

My research links the fields of modern British history, disability history, and health history. My earlier research examined mental health and psychiatry in modern Britain and the development of occupational health services. I am currently working on two disability history projects.

Disabled Children's Rights in Post-war Britain

My new research project, funded by an AHRC Curiosity Award, examines how the emergence of disability rights and children's rights movements affected attitudes towards and experiences of disabled children, and explores what the policy implications of this history are. I will be scoping different primary source materials and collaborating with partners - Down's Syndrome Association, Scope, and Shine - to develop a methodology for a large research project that writes disabled children in as subjects and agents. I will also be working with Scope and Wellcome Collection to pilot participatory approaches to cataloguing Scope's archive.

Disability and Medicine in Post-War Britain

My current book project explores how British doctors in the 1960s dramatically reduced the mortality and morbidity arising from spina bifida through surgical and medical interventions, only to reject these life-saving interventions in most cases just a decade later. This book grew out of a 2018-2019 Wellcome Seed Award, "Decision Making in Pregnancy after 1970", but has evolved to focus more on debates about the care of disabled babies. It examines interconnections between changing patterns of neonatal treatment and care, the development of prenatal screening and diagnosis for spina bifida, and research into preventing spina bifida through dietary folate fortification. I place these developments in wider contexts: reproductive rights; health economics, epidemiology, and evidence-based medicine; the development of medical ethics; ableism and the emergence of disability rights. My book reveals the impact of these developments on doctors, disabled people, and parents. A connected article, 'A baby named Louise: medical ethics, informed consent, and the value of disabled infant lives in the summer of 1978', is in press with Social History of Medicine.

Mental Health and Psychiatry in Modern Britain

My 2014 book, Destigmatising Mental Illness? Professional Politics and Public Education in Britain, 1870-1970, examined mental healthcare workers' efforts to educate the public. It argues that psychiatrists, nurses, and social workers generated representations of mental illness that reflected their professional aspirations, economic motivations, and perceptions of the public. Sharing in the stigma of their patients, healthcare workers sought to enhance the prestige of their professions by focusing on the ability of psychiatry to treat acute cases of mental disturbance effectively. I concluded that, as a consequence, healthcare workers inadvertently reinforced the stigma attached to serious and enduring mental distress.

I subsequently turned my attention to post-war mental health services in Britain. Outputs arising from this work include two co-edited books with Despo Kritsotaki and Matt Smith: Deinstitutionalisation and After: Post-War Psychiatry in the Western World, and Preventing Mental Illness: Past, Present and Future. I have also published articles and book chapters on the limitations of deinstitutionalisation, how evolving policies and practices affected the care of long-stay patients, and the relationship between work and mental health, which brings together my interests in mental health and occupational health.

Occupational Health and Disability

My work as a research assistant at Warwick University on the Wellcome project grant, 'The Politics and Practices of Health in Britain', resulted in my 2011 book, The Rise and Fall of the Healthy Factory: The Politics of Industrial Health in Britain, 1914-1960. Focusing on the role of the Trades Union Congress, I analysed the politics of industrial health, studying the negotiations that took place between the government, unions, employers, and the medical profession as efforts were made to actualize the vision of the healthy factory and implement a national occupational health service.

I subsequently worked as co-investigator on the collaborative Wellcome-funded programme grant, 'Disability and Industrial Society: A Comparative Cultural History of British Coalfields, 1780-1948'. Led by Swansea University, I managed the case study of the north-east coalfields.

 

Current PhD supervisions:

  • Michael Henderson, 'An historical perspective on the "north-south health divide" and regional health inequalities' (funded as part of a Wellcome Investigator Award, 'North and South: regional health inequalities', led by Professor Clare Bambra).
  • Amberlea Jones, 'The understudied influence: unveiling the contributions of the northeast of England in twentieth-century psychiatric research'.
  • Ally Keane, 'Giving voice to experience: A history of augmentative and alternative communication' (funded by AHRC Northern Bridge).
  • Hannah Reynolds, 'Oppressed by liberation: British women's experiences of the intrauterine device as a contraceptive method, 1970-1990'.
  • Lily Tidman, 'Who cares? Health volunteering and political participation in the "far North" of England, 1979-1997' (funded by AHRC Northern Bridge).
  • Bev Williams, 'Life course histories of disabled children cared for by the WSS, 1882-1922' (funded by AHRC Northern Bridge).


Recent PhD Completions

  • Jennifer Farquharson, 'Citizen soldier: the marginalized civilian patient in war-time Scotland, c. 1914-1930' (Glasgow Caledonian University: funded by a GCU Studentship). 
  • Rachel Hewitt, 'Highly evolved: epileptic colonies and "the epileptic", 1870-1935' (Glasgow Caledonian University: funded by the Wellcome Trust). 
  • Didi Rein Johnson, 'The feel of home: emotions history in the British nineteenth-century middle-class home'. 
  • Ellie Schlappa, 'Deprived of both modesty and reason: medical and cultural representations of the female onanist in eighteenth-century England' (funded through AHRC Northern Bridge).
  • Katherine Waugh, 'The Industrial Past in the Deindustrialised Present: A Cross-Generational Oral History of County Durham Mining Towns' (funded through AHRC Northern Bridge).
  • Yier Xu, 'Who is the Modern Citizen: Diseases, Professions, and Identities in Guangxi and beyond, 1920 to 1950' (funded by Wellcome).


 


Teaching

Although my teaching varies year on year, I typically contribute across all years of the undergraduate History (single, joint and combined honours) and the MA in History. I am module leader for the second year module, "Contesting Reproductive Rights in Britain and Ireland" (co-taught with Dr Sarah Campbell) and the third year module, "From Citizen to Lunatic? Madness and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain."

Publications