Skip to main content

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. I've published two monographs, which examine the politics underpinning the development of occupational health services in twentieth-century Britain, and the efforts made by mental healthcare professions to destigmatise mental illness from the late nineteenth century onwards. Other articles, chapters and edited books examined 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.

My current book project explores how the emergence of new systems of valuing life in late twentieth-century Britain exerted a powerful influence over British health policy, devaluing the lives of disabled people. In the 1950s and 1960s, significant advances in surgical, medical and orthopaedic 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-saving and in some cases life sustaining care from most babies born with this condition, believing it was better that such babies did not survive. I chart the medical, social, personal and intellectual connections between these events, the development of prenatal screening and diagnosis for spina bifida, which commence in the 1970s, and research into the prevention of neural tube defects, including spina bifida, through dietary folate fortification in the 1980s.

I’m a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy 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).

I am currently Director of Research and Impact for History, Classics and Archaeology at Newcastle.

Research

My research links the fields of modern British history, disability history, and health history. I am currently writing a book which examines how British doctors in the 1950s and 1960s dramatically reduced the mortality and morbidity arising from open spina bifida through surgical, medical and orthopaedic interventions which started shortly after birth, only for most doctors to reject these life-saving interventions in the majority of cases just a decade later, on the grounds that these babies' lives were not worth saving. This book develops out of a 2018-2019 Wellcome Seed Award, "Decision Making in Pregnancy after 1970", and I explore the interconnections between these changing patterns of neonatal treatment and care, and two other fields: the development of prenatal screening and diagnosis for spina bifida, and research into dietary folate fortification as a means of lowering the incidence of spina bifida, and other neural tube defects. I locate the entanglement of these fields against the backdrop of rapid developments in reproductive rights; the evolution of the NHS, health economics, epidemiology, evidence-based medicine, and bioethics; and disability rights, in late twentieth-century Britain. My book reveals the impact of these developments on disabled people, and on parents who were asked to make difficult and often distressing decisions about their pregnancies, or the care of their babies.

Other strands of my research examine mental health, occupational health and disability, and work and gender. I completed my PhD thesis in 2004 at the University of Warwick and later revised and extended this research to complete my 2014 book, Destigmatising Mental Illness? This work examined mental healthcare workers' efforts to educate the public, and argues that psychiatrists, nurses, and social workers generated representations of mental illness which 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 upon the ability of psychiatry to effectively treat acute cases of mental disturbance. 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, publishing - individually and in collaboration with Despo Kritsotaki and Matt Smith - on the limitations of deinstitutionalization and how evolving policies and practices affected the care of long-stay patients. I also have a longstanding interest in the relationship between work and mental health, which brings together my interests in mental health and occupational health and have published articles and book chapters on this topic.

My other main strand of research examines occupational health and disability, while also considering the gendering of work and of workplace. My work as 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. Focusing on the role of the Trades Union Congress, I analysed the politics of industrial health, studying the negotiations which took place between the government, the 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', which was led by Swansea University.

 

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).
  • Ally Keane, 'Giving voice to experience: A history of augmentative and alternative communication' (funded by AHRC Northern Bridge).
  • Lily Tidman, 'Who cares? Health volunteering and political participation in the "far North" of England, 1979-1997' (funded by AHRC Northern Bridge).
  • Hannah Reynolds, 'Oppressed by liberation: British women's experiences of the intrauterine device as a contraceptive method, 1970-1990'.
  • Bev Williams, 'Life course histories of disabled children cared for by the WSS, 1882-1922' (funded by AHRC Northern Bridge).
  • Yier Xu, 'Medical Pluralism at the Periphery: Health, Modernity and Ethnicity in Guangxi, China, 1920s-1950s' (funded by Wellcome).

 

Recent PhD Completions

 

  • Rachel Hewitt, 'Highly evolved: epileptic colonies and "the epileptic", 1870-1935' (Glasgow Caledonian University: funded by the Wellcome Trust). 
  • Jennifer Farquharson, 'Citizen soldier: the marginalized civilian patient in war-time Scotland, c. 1914-1930' (Glasgow Caledonian University: funded by a GCU Studentship). 
  • 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).

 

I welcome enquires from prospective PhD students with interests in modern British healthcare policy and practice, particularly the fields of reproductive health, psychiatry and mental health, and occupational health and disability; modern British disability history; and those with interests in the socio-cultural history of twentieth-century Britain more broadly.


Teaching
Although my teaching varies year on year, I typically contribute across all years of the undergraduate History (single, joint and combined honours) and taught postgraduate degree programmes (British History and History of Medicine). 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