Event Details

Joint Centre for War and Diplomacy / Department of History Research Seminar Dr Ismini Pells (University of Oxford), speaking on 'Theory and practice in military medicine during the English Civil Wars: new evidence from Civil War Petitions'

Dr Ismini Pells (University of Oxford), 'Theory and practice in military medicine during the English Civil Wars: new evidence from Civil War Petitions'

In the popular imagination, early modern medicine has not enjoyed a favourable reputation, although scholarship on the English Civil Wars has begun to rescue the medical staff who served during the conflict from their reputation as bungling and dangerous amateurs recruited from the lowest echelons of a primitive profession. The publications of leading Civil War practitioners have been analysed and shown to contain forward-thinking and scientific practices that remained in place with only modest refinements for centuries afterwards. Nevertheless, it remains unclear how far such celebrity cases were representative of widespread practice and how far the medical care administered under Civil War systems lived up to contemporary expectations. However, the Civil War Petitions project has been gathering documents submitted by maimed soldiers who claimed war pensions from the state, which provide crucial testimonies from those who survived the fighting. These reveal evidence surrounding the types of wounds received by Civil War soldiers, the treatment they received and how this impacted upon their return to civilian life. Using the material gathered by the Civil War Petitions project, this talk will bring to light the treatments described in these documents and compare these to the expectations of contemporary military medical authors from both Britain and mainland Europe to ascertain how far widespread practice correlated to published theory.

Ismini Pells is currently a departmental lecturer at the University of Oxford. She is also the project manager of an AHRC-funded research project investigating pensions awarded to maimed soldiers and war widows from the seventeenth-century British Civil Wars. She previously worked as the project manager on this project while a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Leicester. Prior to that, she was a research associate at the University of Exeter on a project examining early modern medical practitioners. Ismini studied for her PhD at the University of Cambridge and her thesis explored the career of Philip Skippon, commander of the infantry in parliament’s New Model Army. Her recent publications include Philip Skippon and the British Civil Wars: The ‘Christian Centurion’ (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020) and ‘Reassessing frontline medical practitioners of the British Civil Wars in the context of the seventeenth-century medical world’, The Historical Journal, 62: 2 (2019), pp. 399-425.