About
I am a historian of medicine and psychiatry, currently teaching the history of science/medicine and medical humanities at Imperial College London. Prior to that I was a fixed-term Lecturer in Cultural and Intellectual History at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), and before that a postdoctoral researcher on the
Diseases of Modern Life project at the University of Oxford. Alongside my work in the history of medicine, I write (usually in a non-academic context) on film and music.
Much of my recent academic research explores connections between bodies, environments, and medical technologies. At present I am working on the history of post-mortem investigation (particularly postmortems carried out in domestic spaces), and on the ethics of death and photography.
Publications
Books
Rebecca Wynter, Jennifer Wallis and Rob Ellis (eds),
Memory, Anniversaries and Mental Health in International Perspective: Faith in Reform (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).
Chris Millard and Jennifer Wallis (eds),
Sources in the History of Psychiatry, from 1800 to the Present (Routledge, 2022).
Amelia Bonea, Melissa Dickson, Sally Shuttleworth, and Jennifer Wallis,
Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019).
Jennifer Wallis,
Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum: Doctors, Patients, and Practices (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
Jennifer Wallis (ed.),
Fight Your Own War: Power Electronics and Noise Culture (Headpress, 2016).
David Bates, Jennifer Wallis, and Jane Winters (eds),
The Creighton Century, 1907 – 2007 (University of London, 2009).
Book chapters
Jennifer Wallis, ‘Small screen shockers: Rape-revenge narratives in the made-for-TV movie’, in Xavier Mendik and Julian Petley (eds),
Shocking Cinema of the 70s (Bloomsbury, 2022).
—, ‘A machine in the garden: The compressed air bath and the nineteenth-century health resort’, in Jon Agar and Jacob Ward (eds),
Histories of Technology, the Environment and Modern Britain (UCL Press, 2018).
—, ‘Locating sexual abuse in the TV movie, from dangerous dads to day care’ and ‘Rape-revenge and rape-response: Narratives of sexual violence and justice in the TV movie’, in Amanda Reyes (ed.),
Are You in the House Alone? A TV Movie Compendium (Headpress, 2016).
—, ‘Atrophied, engorged, debauched: Degenerative processes and moral worth in the general paralytic body’, in Thomas Knowles and Serena Trowbridge (eds),
Insanity and the Lunatic Asylum in the Nineteenth Century (Pickering & Chatto, 2015).
—, ‘Deathpile:
G.R.‘, in Mark Goodall (ed.),
Gathering of the Tribe: Music and Heavy Conscious Creation (Headpress, 2013).
—, ‘A dangerous madness’, in Julian Upton (ed.),
Offbeat: British Cinema’s Curiosities, Obscurities and Forgotten Gems (Headpress, 2012).
Articles
Neepa Thacker, Jennifer Wallis, and Jo Winning, ”
Capable of being in uncertainties’: applied medical humanities in undergraduate medical education‘,
BMJ Medical Humanities (2021). Online First.
Sally Frampton and Jennifer Wallis, ‘
Reading medicine and health in periodicals‘,
Media History, 25 (Feb. 2019): 1-5.
Jennifer Wallis, ‘
A home or a gaol? Scandal, secrecy, and the St James’s Inebriate Home for Women‘,
Social History of Medicine, 31 (Nov. 2018): 774-95.
—, ‘
Putting mental illness under the microscope in the nineteenth century‘,
Microbiologist, 19 (Jun. 2018): 18-21.
—, ‘
Bloody technology: The sphygmograph in asylum practice‘,
History of Psychiatry, 28 (Sept. 2017): 297-310.
—, ‘
In the shadow of the asylum: The Stanley Royd Salmonella outbreak of 1984‘,
BMJ Medical Humanities, 42 (Mar. 2016): 11-16.
—, ‘Tracing the sphygmograph in Victorian asylum practice’,
Bulletin of the Scientific Instrument Society, 124 (Mar. 2015): 25-28.
—, ‘
The bones of the insane‘,
History of Psychiatry, 24 (Jun. 2013): 196-211.
Book reviews
Jennifer Wallis, ‘
Anatomy of the Medical Image: Knowledge Production and Transfiguration from the Renaissance to Today ed. by Axel Fliethmann and Christiane Weller (review)’,
Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 97 (Dec. 2023), 516-18.
—, ‘
Anna Harris; Tom Rice, Stethoscope: The Making of a Medical Icon. London: Reaktion Books, 2022‘,
Isis, 114 (Dec, 2023), 878-79.
—, ‘
Sophie Vasset, Murky Waters: British Spas in Eighteenth-Century Medicine and Literature (Manchester: MUP, 2022)’,
Northern History, 60 (2023), 278-79.
—, ‘
Leonard Smith, Private Madhouses in England, 1640-1815: Commercialised Care for the Insane (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)‘,
Continuity and Change, 36 (Oct. 2021): 261-63.
—, ‘
Jonathan Sadowsky, Electroconvulsive Therapy in America: Anatomy of a Medical Controversy. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2017‘,
The British Journal for the History of Science, 50 (Dec. 2017): 738-40.
—, ‘
Rina Knoeff and Robert Zwijnenberg (eds), The Fate of Anatomical Collections. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015‘,
The British Journal for the History of Science, 49 (Mar. 2016): 127-29.
—, ‘
Colin Jones, The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth Century Paris. Oxford, OUP, 2014‘,
Reviews in History, 1731 (Feb. 2015).
—, ‘
Rosalind Crone, Violent Victorians: Popular Entertainment in Nineteenth-Century London. Manchester, MUP, 2012‘,
Reviews in History, 1279 (Jun. 2012).
—, ‘
Samuel J.M.M. Alberti, Morbid Curiosities: Medical Museums in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Oxford, OUP, 2011‘,
Reviews in History, 1192 (Jan. 2012).
—, ‘
Mark S. Micale, Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008‘,
History of the Human Sciences, 23 (Oct. 2010): 113-16.
Posters
Rasha Mezher-Sikafi, Heather MacFarlane, Jennifer Wallis, Lydia Boynton, Adrian Raby, Elizabeth Muir, Heather Hanna, Wing May Kong, ‘Autonomy and touch; highlighting the benefits and importance of touch to early years medical students, an evaluation’, AMEE Conference 2023.
