Kevin Siena
Professor
M.A. (Rochester); Ph.D. (Toronto)
Champlain College I3
(705) 748-1011 x 7139
ksiena@trentu.ca
RESEARCH INTERESTS
I work on early modern British history with special interests in medical history, sex and disease, contagion, class, female healers, Enlightenment science, urban poverty, epidemics and social welfare. I am currently exploring how different branches of Enlightenment-era science configured social class and how ideas about class and race intersected in the period.
BOOKS
Rotten Bodies: Class and Contagion in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Yale University Press, May 2019)
Venereal Disease, Hospitals and the Urban Poor: London's 'Foul Wards' 1600-1800, (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2004, Paperback, 2010).
(ed.) w/ J. Reinarz, A Medical History of Skin: Scratching the Surface (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013).
(ed.) Sins of the Flesh: Responding to Sexual Disease in Early Modern Europe (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2005).
ARTICLES/BOOK CHAPTERS
(w/Simon Szreter) “The pox in Boswell's London: an estimate of the extent of syphilis infection in the metropolis in the 1770s,” Economic History Review 74 (2) (2021): 372-399.
“On Courtroom Dramas and Plot Twists: Typhus in Eighteenth-Century London,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 94 (4) (2020): 590-601.
“Plague, flu and the unpredictable contours of medical historiography,” in “The 2020 Historical Research lecture: Writing histories of 2020: first responses and early perspectives,” (w/ Richard Vinen and Clare Langhamer), Historical Research 93 (262) (2020): 786–806
“Corpses, Contagion and Courage: Fear and the Inspection of Bodies in 17th-Century London” in Francesco Paolo di Ceglia (ed.) The Body of Evidence: Corpses and Proofs in Early Modern Medicine (Leiden: Brill, 2020). Pp. 149-74.
“Peter Lowe, La maladie générale (1596),” “Andrew Boorde, Diversité des noms, des formes et des causes (1547),” “Peter Lowe, Un facteur aggravant: la chaleur de la passion (1596),” “William Clowes, Le témoignage d’un médecin anglais (1579),” and “Peter Lowe, Contre le gaïac (1596),” in Ariane Bayle and Gregoire Holtz (eds.) Le Siècle des vérolés: La Renaissance européenne face à la syphilis, (Grenoble: Les Editions Jérôme Millon, 2019), pp. 45-46, 59-60, 84-85, 127-131 and 205-206.
“Contagion, Exclusion and Unique Medical World of the Eighteenth-Century Workhouse” in Jonathan Reinarz and L. D. Schwarz (eds.) in Medicine and the Workhouse (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2013), pp. 19-39.
(with Alysa Levene,) “Reporting Dirt and Disease: Child Ill-Health in Eighteenth-Century England” Journal of Literature and Science 6 (1) (2013): 1-17.
“The Moral Biology of the Itch in Eighteenth-century Britain,” in Reinarz and Siena (ed.) A Medical History of Skin: Scratching the Surface (London, Pickering and Chatto, 2013), pp. 71-84.
“‘The Venereal Disease,’ 1500-1800” in Sarah Toulalan and Kate Fisher (eds.) The Routledge History of Sex and the Body, 1500 to the Present (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 463-478.
“Searchers of the Dead in the Eighteenth Century” in Lori Woods and Kim Kippen (eds.) Gender and Marginality in Pre-modern Europe, (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2011), pp. 123-152.
“Hospitals for the Excluded or Convalescent Homes?: workhouses, medicalization and the poor law in long eighteenth-century London and pre-Confederation Toronto.” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, Volume 27 (1) (2010): 5-25
“Pliable Bodies: The Moral Biology of Health and Disease in the Enlightenment”, in Carole Reeves (ed.) Cultural History of the Human Body in the Enlightenment (Oxford: Berg, 2010), pp. 33-52
“Suicide as an Illness Strategy in the Long Eighteenth Century” in John Weaver and David Wright (eds.) Histories of Suicide: International Perspectives on Self-Destruction in the Modern World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), pp. 53-72.
“Stage Managing a Hospital in the Eighteenth Century: Visitation at the London Lock Hospital,” in Graham Mooney and Jonathan Reinarz (eds.), Permeable Walls: Historical Perspectives on Hospital and Asylum Visiting, (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), pp. 175-98.
“The Strange Medical Silence on Same-Sex Transmission of the Pox c. 1660-c.1760” in G. S. Rousseau and Kenneth Borris (eds.) The Sciences of Homosexuality in Early Modern Europe (Routledge, 2007), pp. 115-33.
“The Clean and the Foul: Paupers and the Pox in London Hospitals c. 1550-c.1700” in Kevin Siena (ed.) Sins of the Flesh: Responding to Sexual Disease in Early Modern Europe (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2005), pp. 261-284.
“The ‘Foul’ Disease and Privacy: The effects of venereal disease and patient demand on the medical marketplace in early modern London”, Bulletin of the History of Medicine: 75 (2) (2001):199-224
“Pollution, Promiscuity and the Pox: English Venereology and the Early Modern Medical Discourse on Social and Sexual Danger”, Journal of the History of Sexuality: 8 (4) (1998): 553-574.