- 07824701207
Paul Craddock
The Science Museum, London, Research, Department Member
- Imperial College London, Centre for Languages, Culture and Communication, Department MemberUniversity College London, Division of Surgery & Interventional Science, Department Memberadd
- I'm a cultural historian and author based in London. My debut book, Spare Parts (Penguin 2021), is a history of trans... moreI'm a cultural historian and author based in London. My debut book, Spare Parts (Penguin 2021), is a history of transplant surgery from the sixteenth century to the present day. It was a Daily Mail Book of the Week and won the Special Commendation of the Royal Society of Literature Giles St Aubyn Awards.I'm a Science Museum Group Senior Research Associate (SMGSRA), an Honorary Senior Research Associate of UCL’s Division of Surgery, and a Visiting Lecturer at Imperial College London.
My current academic work covers three areas:
1) Valuing the scientific and medical contributions of makers and performers.
2) Developing methods to acknowledge and accommodate the 'embodied' contributions of makers and performers into historical accounts. I'm working on ways of using film production methods to respect the multimodal richness of scientific knowledge.
3) The relationship between science and trust. That is, both how scientists have historically handled their relationship with the public. It's important to value the scientific contributions of makers and performers because, historically, it was by artisanal making and performing that women and working class people contributed to scientific knowledge.edit
How did an architect help pioneer blood transfusion in the 1660s? Why did eighteenth-century dentists buy the live teeth of poor children? And what role did a sausage skin and an enamel bath play in making kidney transplants a reality?... more
How did an architect help pioneer blood transfusion in the 1660s?
Why did eighteenth-century dentists buy the live teeth of poor children?
And what role did a sausage skin and an enamel bath play in making kidney transplants a reality?
We think of transplant surgery as one of the medical wonders of the modern world. But transplant surgery is as ancient as the pyramids, with a history more surprising than we might expect. Paul Craddock takes us on a journey - from sixteenth-century skin grafting to contemporary stem cell transplants - uncovering stories of operations performed by unexpected people in unexpected places. Bringing together philosophy, science and cultural history, Spare Parts explores how transplant surgery constantly tested the boundaries between human, animal and machine, and continues to do so today.
Witty, entertaining and at times delightfully macabre, Spare Parts shows us that the history - and future - of transplant surgery is tied up with questions about not only who we are, but also what we are, and what we might become. . .
Why did eighteenth-century dentists buy the live teeth of poor children?
And what role did a sausage skin and an enamel bath play in making kidney transplants a reality?
We think of transplant surgery as one of the medical wonders of the modern world. But transplant surgery is as ancient as the pyramids, with a history more surprising than we might expect. Paul Craddock takes us on a journey - from sixteenth-century skin grafting to contemporary stem cell transplants - uncovering stories of operations performed by unexpected people in unexpected places. Bringing together philosophy, science and cultural history, Spare Parts explores how transplant surgery constantly tested the boundaries between human, animal and machine, and continues to do so today.
Witty, entertaining and at times delightfully macabre, Spare Parts shows us that the history - and future - of transplant surgery is tied up with questions about not only who we are, but also what we are, and what we might become. . .
Research Interests:
While visual methods obviously exist in the humanities, as do practice-as-research methods employing film, to my knowledge there is no approach for historians to respect the integrity of the knowledge of the maker. By employing a... more
While visual methods obviously exist in the humanities, as do practice-as-research methods employing film, to my knowledge there is no approach for historians to respect the integrity of the knowledge of the maker. By employing a combination of textual and ‘re-’ methods (re-enactment, replication, reworking), however, historians of science and art have recognised and historically located practices of making and performing, and examined their cultural significance . Film is rarely used in this context as anything other than an engagement tool, to ‘tell the story’ of the research, to report it in a more-or-less documentary-style format. Drawing on the work of historians of science, anthropologists and multimodalists, I argue that film might also be used by historians and other humanities researchers working on practices of making to richly account for knowledge produced and made manifest in non-written modes.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Vascular anastomosis, the surgical process of connecting blood vessels to one another, was made viable by Alexis Carrel at the turn of the twentieth century. His technique became fundamental to modern vascular surgery, and is central to... more
Vascular anastomosis, the surgical process of connecting blood vessels to one another, was made viable by Alexis Carrel at the turn of the twentieth century. His technique became fundamental to modern vascular surgery, and is central to the man’s legacy as “father” of vascular surgery. Carrel was, however, taught by the famous Lyon embroiderer Marie Anne Leroudier, the significance of which has yet to be examined. In this article, I work with the embroiderer Fleur Oakes to re-enact a simulation Carrel excelled at – putting stitches into a cigarette paper – and to discuss a selection of Leroudier’s works in relation to his surgical practice. Our simulation and its subsequent discussion, I argue, is an invitation to frame vascular anastomosis in gendered and craft terms, and to problematise the still-dominant construction of the young Carrel as the archetypal heroic, male surgeon.
Research Interests:
If you had enough money, in the late eighteenth century, you could pay a dentist to replace your rotten teeth with someone else’s healthy teeth. The tooth transplant was technically simple by the standards of today’s transplant surgery –... more
If you had enough money, in the late eighteenth century, you could pay a dentist to replace your rotten teeth with someone else’s healthy teeth. The tooth transplant was technically simple by the standards of today’s transplant surgery – the surgeon simply inserted a freshly-drawn tooth into the recipient’s mouth, and tied it in place until it united with the body – but the cultural and economic significance of the operation is far more complex. This article examines the role of the economy and economic metaphors in the cultural significance of eighteenth-century tooth transplant. It specifically analyses concepts of financial, societal, and bodily circulation as they appear in representations both of the procedure, and of emerging donor-recipient relationships. In exploring these three kinds of circulation, this article will draw together and extend work on the commercialisation of dentistry, the social dynamic of the tooth transplant, and vitalist discourse of John Hunter.
Research Interests: Sociology, History of Medicine, History of Science, Eighteenth Century History, Consumerism, and 14 moreTransplantation, Eighteenth century Literature, Retailing, Vitalism, Teeth, Eighteenth Century Studies, Eighteenth Century British History and Culture, John Hunter (1728-1793), Circulation, Thomas Rowlandson, History of Retailing, Tooth, John Hunter, and History of Vitalism
We think of transplant surgery as a modern scientific wonder but, as Paul Craddock discovered, it goes back centuries. And it also provokes elemental questions about what it means to have a body.
Research Interests:
Socio-economic groups are rarely high among the selfdefinitions to which people cling in the 21st-century era of identity politics. Consequently, while universities are often prodded to widen participation at undergraduate levels, the... more
Socio-economic groups are rarely high among the selfdefinitions
to which people cling in the 21st-century
era of identity politics. Consequently, while universities
are often prodded to widen participation at undergraduate
levels, the proportion of people from poor
backgrounds at postgraduate and faculty levels typically
receives much less attention than the representation, say, of
women or people from ethnic minorities.
Nevertheless, an academic career arguably remains as
remote an aspiration as it has ever been for working-class
academics. That is because even if, against all the odds,
they excel at school and – perhaps via a widening participation
initiative – find their way to a top university, they
must still negotiate an alien, emphatically middle-class
cultural setting, not to mention sustain themselves during
the various periods of low or no income that early career
academics typically have to endure.
to which people cling in the 21st-century
era of identity politics. Consequently, while universities
are often prodded to widen participation at undergraduate
levels, the proportion of people from poor
backgrounds at postgraduate and faculty levels typically
receives much less attention than the representation, say, of
women or people from ethnic minorities.
Nevertheless, an academic career arguably remains as
remote an aspiration as it has ever been for working-class
academics. That is because even if, against all the odds,
they excel at school and – perhaps via a widening participation
initiative – find their way to a top university, they
must still negotiate an alien, emphatically middle-class
cultural setting, not to mention sustain themselves during
the various periods of low or no income that early career
academics typically have to endure.
Research Interests:
Written articles may usually be the most appropriate scholarly medium, but
why are the alternatives so undervalued, asks Paul Craddock
why are the alternatives so undervalued, asks Paul Craddock
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
This article consists of one short video and accompanying reflective documentation. The video focuses on museum volunteer Greg Kotovs and his operation of a can-gill machine at the Bradford Industrial Museum. It attempts to acknowledge... more
This article consists of one short video and accompanying reflective documentation. The video focuses on museum volunteer Greg Kotovs and his operation of a can-gill machine at the Bradford Industrial Museum. It attempts to acknowledge the historical worker’s embodied expertise, and a certain epistemology associated with the knowledge of the industrial maker. In this way, it connects two kinds of discipline – discipline in terms of the skilled worker’s body, and discipline in terms of the organisation of knowledge. As appropriate to an Action Research project, the text component of the article focuses on the evolution of my practice as a ‘research filmmaker’ over the course of the investigation. I pay particular focus to how film production has become an opportunity to engage with objects of industrial heritage being used, and I reflect on the significance of creating such footage.