William Matthews Memorial Lecture 2025. In Vitro: The Fertility Industry Medieval and Modern.
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck Clore Management Centre
In this talk, Isabel Davis compares the appeal, promises and costs of some extraordinary speculative medical services on offer centuries apart.
Biomedical services can be very beautifully packaged in colour, pattern, light and enlightenment. Those services come at a cost, which is not always counted as we gaze at them in wonder. Isabel Davis puts some medieval and modern reproductive healthcare services into convulsive exchange, using historical perspective to ask: what is the state of the art?
Every day it seems, new pioneering assisted reproductive technologies are celebrated in the news, and not only those aimed at humans, but also those supporting threatened and even extinct non-human animal species. But how modern are we? After all, doubt, difficulty, delay, and disappointment are not only things of the past. In this talk, Isabel Davis gives a flavour of her new book, Conceiving Histories, arguing that medieval science has some surprising lessons for assessing the promises of modern health tech.
William Matthews Memorial Lecture
In 1981, Birkbeck received a bequest from the estate of the late Professor William Matthews for annual lectures on the English language or medieval literature. The lectures alternate between these subjects. A Londoner who went on to be an eminent medieval scholar at UCLA and an editor of Pepys, Matthews was also an enthusiastic teacher of literature. An obituary quotes him as saying “I have taught literature from antiquity to the present day, history, geography, shorthand, typewriting, and football.”
Contact name:
Sue Wiseman
-
Dr Isabel Davis
-
Isabel Davis is a research leader at the Natural History Museum, London, supporting arts and humanities research on the Museum's world-class natural history collections. A cultural historian, she has a research profile in health and environmental history. She is the author of Conceiving Histories: Trying for Pregnancy, Past and Present (MIT, 2025): which tells wild and wonderful little-known histories from the reproductive frontline, and is arrestingly illustrated by visual artist, Anna Burel.
- Prof Fintan Walsh