Current Seminar Series
Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland (CHOMI) Seminar Programme
Spring 2026
12th February 2026
“Sorted”: Leah Betts, ‘ordinariness’ and drugs in 1990s Britain
Dr Peder Clark
Abstract: When Essex teenager Leah Betts fell into a coma and eventually died after taking an Ecstasy pill in late 1995, her parents were keen to highlight the 18-year-old’s ordinariness. Her father told the media that Leah was “a normal, joyful little girl … She was nothing special, but she was special to us.” Bett’s death was afforded front-page coverage by every major news outlet, whilst a black-and-white portrait of her was plastered on billboards across the UK, warning that “just one ecstasy tablet took Leah Betts”. The key message that the Betts family wished to convey was that Leah’s ordinariness was no protection against the “pure poison” of Ecstasy, and that no-one’s child was safe. This media coverage was however at odds with the lived experiences of thousands of Ecstasy consumers, whose drug use was indeed “ordinary”; as Leah’s stepmother conceded, for young people “taking ecstasy [was] like trying a can of lager.”
This paper explores the circumstances of Betts’ death and media afterlife, and draws on recent oral history interviews with those who consumed Ecstasy in the 1990s. This paper examines what happened when the life of an “ordinary” young woman met an extraordinary end and was exposed to the glare of media attention, and what this history tells us about young womanhood in the 1990s, media culture, and the normalisation of drugs.
Join us on Zoom: (opens in a new window)https://ucd-ie.zoom.us/
5th March
Obstetric Temporalities: The Medical-Moral Discourse of Caesarean Section in Britain, 1837-1852
Dr Sally Frampton (University of Oxford)
Abstract: This paper identifies a significant period in the discourse around caesarean section and other interventions for obstructed labour in nineteenth-century Britain. Framed by changing legal frameworks for pregnancy and abortion, aspirations for a more robust professional status among obstetricians and competing ideas about what a humane, morally legitimate obstetrics should look like, cases of caesarean section, while by no means common in this period, were presented and published with a degree of regularity and when they were, deeply scrutinised. Threaded into these discussions were wider questions of surgical ethics, much of which centred around the temporality of intervention, and whether it was justifiable to perform a risky operation before a case was deemed urgent. In this way debates of the period laid the ground for later, often gendered, conceptions of ‘elective’ and ‘emergency’ intervention, concepts that remain slippery today.
Join us on Zoom: (opens in a new window)https://ucd-ie.zoom.us/
26th March 2026
One Health in History: Insights from Colonial Nigeria’s Meat Industry
Dr. Ṣeun Sedẹ Williams (University College Dublin)
Abstract: This paper examines how colonial interventions in Nigeria created an interconnected health framework, prefiguring contemporary “One Health” approaches by several decades. Colonial campaigns against cattle epizootics like rinderpest and bovine pleuropneumonia became entangled with efforts to address “animal-protein malnutrition” among Africans. British colonisers justified disease control not merely as veterinary policy but as essential interspecies public health intervention, claiming epizootic losses worsened protein deficiency. This framing positioned animal health as inseparable from human welfare, while environmental management—targeting tsetse habitats and rangelands—addressed disease vectors, animal nutrition and livestock productivity simultaneously. These interventions, which transformed landscapes and disrupted indigenous pastoral systems, primarily served imperial extractive purposes while professing “humanitarian” and ecological imperatives. By historicising “One Health” thinking in colonial Nigeria, this paper reveals how health frameworks can encode asymmetric power relations, offering critical perspectives on contemporary global health initiatives that mobilise similar human-animal-environmental health paradigms.
Join us on Zoom: (opens in a new window)https://ucd-ie.zoom.us/