Steve Sturdy
Biographic Data
| ID | 208083 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Steve Sturdy |
| GIVEN NAMES | Steve |
| FAMILY NAME | Sturdy |
| SIGNATURE | STURDY S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Edinburgh |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3273-1727 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 88 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Histories of Scientific Responsibility in Japan and the United Kingdom
We historicize talk of social responsibility in relation to science and technology. By charting the multiple and contested notions of responsibility that scientists have espoused from the early twentieth century to the present, we show how scientists have used the word strategically, at different times and in different contexts, to project their preferred views of how science should relate to wider society. Comparing Japan and the UK enables us t…
The commercial roots of the genomic commons
Accounts of the origins of the genomic commons typically focus on the development of public repositories and data-sharing agreements. This article tells a different story. During the 1990s in the United States, efforts of private companies to prevent the patenting of certain kinds of DNA sequences were essentially a conservative response to shifts in the sociotechnical constitution of the pharmaceutical innovation system, and to the operation of …
How and why to use ‘vulnerability’
In recent years, ‘vulnerability’ has been getting more traction in theoretical, professional and popular spaces as an alternative or complement to the concept of risk. As a group of science and technology studies scholars with different disciplinary orientations yet a shared concern with biomedicine, self and society, we investigate how vulnerability has become a salient and even dominant idiom for discussing disease and disease risk. We argue th…
Remaking critical care
In this article, we take forward sociological ways of knowing care-in-practice, in particular work in critical care. To do so, we analyse the experiences of staff working in critical care during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK. This moment of exception throws into sharp relief the ways in which work and place were reconfigured during conditions of pandemic surge, and shows how critical care depends at all times on the co-constit…
Domesticating models
Our article traces the representation of pandemic modelling in UK print media from the emergence of Covid-19 to the early stages of implementing the first UK-wide lockdown in late March 2020. Covid modelling, it is widely assumed, has shaped policy decisions and public responses to the pandemic in unprecedented ways. We analyse how the UK print media has configured modelling as a significant evidence tool in the representation of the pandemic. In…
Multidisciplinary perspectives on the regulation of diagnostic technologies
Framing utility
Before about 1990, insofar as diagnostic and other medical tests were subject to regulatory oversight, it was chiefly to ensure that they met appropriate standards of analytic and clinical validity. Over the course of the 1990s, however, regulatory reformers in the United States began to argue that genetic tests, specifically, should also be assessed to determine whether or not they actually benefit those undergoing testing-whether they possess "…
Local mutations
Popular and scientific accounts of the molecularisation of cancer typically attribute it to advances in laboratory science, particularly molecular geneticists. However, historical research has indicated that clinical expertise input was often vital for advancing such work. The present paper reinforces that view. Looking in detail at British research into the molecular genetics of familial cancers during the 1980s and 1990s, it shows that that res…
Biotechnology and the transformation of vaccine innovation
The approval, from 1986, of a series of recombinant hepatitis B vaccines was a landmark both in the growth of biotechnology and in the development of the vaccine innovation system. In this paper, we show how the early development of the hepatitis B vaccines was shaped by a political and economic context that newly favoured commercialisation of academic research, including the appropriation and management of intellectual property; we elucidate the…
Knowledge in policy
Suspect technologies
The entanglement of border control technologies and immigration policies and practices with discourses of race, national identity and belonging has long been a focus of scholarly interest. In this paper we discuss the Human Provenance Pilot Project (HPPP), the aim of which was to evaluate the utility of genetic and isotope testing to corroborate asylum seekers' accounts of their nationality. We subject the HPPP to a detailed socio-technical analy…
Recovery in Scotland
“Recovery” has become a key element in Scottish mental health policy and practice, despite continuing uncertainty over just what is meant by the term. This article draws on social movement theory to explore the processes underlying the growth of recovery in Scotland. Based on documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews with key actors, it looks at the emergence of a “recovery movement” in Scotland and in particular at how that movement ar…
Making Knowledge for International Policy
Journal Article Making Knowledge for International Policy: WHO Europe and Mental Health Policy, 1970–2008 Get access Steve Sturdy, Steve Sturdy * *Correspondence to Dr Steve Sturdy, Science, Technology and Innovation Studies, University of Edinburgh, Old Surgeon's Hall, High School Yards, Edinburgh EH1 1LZ, Scotland. Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Richard Freeman, Richard F…
Genetics and the Sociology of Identity
No description available
Stakeholder Consultation as Social Mobilization
Public and stakeholder consultation is increasingly important in the policy process, both in the UK and elsewhere. Social scientists have considered consultation primarily in terms of how it relates to decision‐making – either as a means of involving a wider constituency of actors in the decision‐making process, or as a means of legitimizing the decisions taken by policymakers. This article shows that consultation can also serve a rather differen…
Looking for Trouble
The relationship between the pursuit of science and the practice of medicine has been a theme of abiding interest among medical historians. For the past 30 years or so, historians have characterised that relationship largely in terms of divergence, tension and conflict. My contention is that that tension has been over-stated. In this paper, I show how the narrative of conflict came to dominate historians ’ accounts of science–medicine relations, …
The Meanings of ‘Life
In the course of his somewhat unorthodox career in science, the physiologist John Scott Haldane occasionally turned to biography to portray the aims and values that he associated with such a career. But the same concerns can also be discerned in his scientific writings which drew, in large part, on experiments he conducted on himself. For Haldane, biology, as the science of life, was inseparable from biography, as the depiction of a life in scien…
Scientific Method for Medical Practitioners
The appointment of James Lorrain Smith as first full-time professor of pathology at the University of Edinburgh in 1912 led to a series of reforms in pathology teaching there. Most significant was the inception of what Lorrain Smith called the "case method of teaching pathology," which used the investigation of clinical cases as the basis for a series of exercises in clinico-pathological correlation. This paper examines the social and cognitive o…
Knowing Cases
This paper examines the scientific work of the Laboratory of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh from its foundation in 1887 to 1920. It looks in particular at the pivotal role of clinical cases in the work of the Laboratory, using the concept of 'triangulation' to analyse how cases served both as objects of scientific knowledge and as sites for articulating and aligning the concerns of medical practitioners and career scientists. It goe…
So Long, Succor
So Long, Succor Steve Sturdy (bio) Dr. Golem is the third in a series of books by Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch that aim to make the insights of science and technology studies (STS) accessible to general readers.1 The Golem, the first of the series, consisted of a number of chapters based on prominent case studies in the social construction of scientific knowledge and highlighted the various contingencies and uncertainties inherent in the work o…
Making Medicine Scientific
John Burdon Sanderson is usually remembered as one of the first generation of British experimental physiologists. He was professor of practical physiology and histology at University College, London, from 1870; the first Jodrell Professor of Physiology at the same institution from 1874; and the first Waynflete Professor of Physiology at the University of Oxford from 1882. He did much to introduce continental methods of laboratory teaching and res…
Gentlemen, Scientists and Doctors
"Gentlemen, Scientists and Doctors: Medicine at Cambridge 1800-1940, by Mark W. Weatherall." Canadian Journal of History, 37(1), pp. 172–173
A Time to Heal
Journal Article ‘A Time to Heal’: The Diffusion of Listerism in Victorian Britain Jerry L. Gaw Get access Steve Sturdy Steve Sturdy University of Edinburgh Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume 115, Issue 463, September 2000, Pages 1009–1010, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/115.463.1009 Published: 01 September 2000
Science, Scientific Management, and the Transformation of Medicine in Britain c . 1870–1950
L'A. souligne les aspects de la transformation culturelle de la medecine qui ont conduit a l'emergence du corporatisme medical entre 1870 et 1950 en Angleterre
Short Notices
Short Notices Get access Edward T. Morman (ed.), Efficiency, Scientific Management, and Hospital Standardization: An Anthology of Sources, New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1989. Pp. 312. $90. ISBN 0-8240-8338-5. STEVE STURDY STEVE STURDY Welcome Unit for the History of MedicineManchester Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social History of Medicine, Volume 4, Issue 3, December 1991, Page 559, https:…
Science, Scientific Management, and the Transformation of Medicine in Britain c . 1870–1950
L'A. souligne les aspects de la transformation culturelle de la medecine qui ont conduit a l'emergence du corporatisme medical entre 1870 et 1950 en Angleterre
Suspect technologies
The entanglement of border control technologies and immigration policies and practices with discourses of race, national identity and belonging has long been a focus of scholarly interest. In this paper we discuss the Human Provenance Pilot Project (HPPP), the aim of which was to evaluate the utility of genetic and isotope testing to corroborate asylum seekers' accounts of their nationality. We subject the HPPP to a detailed socio-technical analy…
Looking for Trouble
The relationship between the pursuit of science and the practice of medicine has been a theme of abiding interest among medical historians. For the past 30 years or so, historians have characterised that relationship largely in terms of divergence, tension and conflict. My contention is that that tension has been over-stated. In this paper, I show how the narrative of conflict came to dominate historians ’ accounts of science–medicine relations, …
Knowing Cases
This paper examines the scientific work of the Laboratory of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh from its foundation in 1887 to 1920. It looks in particular at the pivotal role of clinical cases in the work of the Laboratory, using the concept of 'triangulation' to analyse how cases served both as objects of scientific knowledge and as sites for articulating and aligning the concerns of medical practitioners and career scientists. It goe…
Remaking critical care
In this article, we take forward sociological ways of knowing care-in-practice, in particular work in critical care. To do so, we analyse the experiences of staff working in critical care during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK. This moment of exception throws into sharp relief the ways in which work and place were reconfigured during conditions of pandemic surge, and shows how critical care depends at all times on the co-constit…
Domesticating models
Our article traces the representation of pandemic modelling in UK print media from the emergence of Covid-19 to the early stages of implementing the first UK-wide lockdown in late March 2020. Covid modelling, it is widely assumed, has shaped policy decisions and public responses to the pandemic in unprecedented ways. We analyse how the UK print media has configured modelling as a significant evidence tool in the representation of the pandemic. In…
Making Knowledge for International Policy
Journal Article Making Knowledge for International Policy: WHO Europe and Mental Health Policy, 1970–2008 Get access Steve Sturdy, Steve Sturdy * *Correspondence to Dr Steve Sturdy, Science, Technology and Innovation Studies, University of Edinburgh, Old Surgeon's Hall, High School Yards, Edinburgh EH1 1LZ, Scotland. Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Richard Freeman, Richard F…
Framing utility
Before about 1990, insofar as diagnostic and other medical tests were subject to regulatory oversight, it was chiefly to ensure that they met appropriate standards of analytic and clinical validity. Over the course of the 1990s, however, regulatory reformers in the United States began to argue that genetic tests, specifically, should also be assessed to determine whether or not they actually benefit those undergoing testing-whether they possess "…
Genetics and the Sociology of Identity
No description available
The germs of a new enlightenment
Biotechnology and the transformation of vaccine innovation
The approval, from 1986, of a series of recombinant hepatitis B vaccines was a landmark both in the growth of biotechnology and in the development of the vaccine innovation system. In this paper, we show how the early development of the hepatitis B vaccines was shaped by a political and economic context that newly favoured commercialisation of academic research, including the appropriation and management of intellectual property; we elucidate the…
Biology as Social Theory
During the first forty years of this century, the concept of a living organism was discussed widely and publicly by biologists and philosophers. Two questions in particular excited discussion. In what ways should organisms be considered different from or the same as dead matter? And what can we learn about the nature of human society by regarding it as analogous to a living organism? Inevitably, these questions were closely related; the conclusio…
Multidisciplinary perspectives on the regulation of diagnostic technologies
Stakeholder Consultation as Social Mobilization
Public and stakeholder consultation is increasingly important in the policy process, both in the UK and elsewhere. Social scientists have considered consultation primarily in terms of how it relates to decision‐making – either as a means of involving a wider constituency of actors in the decision‐making process, or as a means of legitimizing the decisions taken by policymakers. This article shows that consultation can also serve a rather differen…
The Meanings of ‘Life
In the course of his somewhat unorthodox career in science, the physiologist John Scott Haldane occasionally turned to biography to portray the aims and values that he associated with such a career. But the same concerns can also be discerned in his scientific writings which drew, in large part, on experiments he conducted on himself. For Haldane, biology, as the science of life, was inseparable from biography, as the depiction of a life in scien…
Biology as Social Theory
During the first forty years of this century, the concept of a living organism was discussed widely and publicly by biologists and philosophers. Two questions in particular excited discussion. In what ways should organisms be considered different from or the same as dead matter? And what can we learn about the nature of human society by regarding it as analogous to a living organism? Inevitably, these questions were closely related; the conclusio…
Local Styles and Experimental Logic History of the American Physiological Society
Short Notices
Short Notices Get access Edward T. Morman (ed.), Efficiency, Scientific Management, and Hospital Standardization: An Anthology of Sources, New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1989. Pp. 312. $90. ISBN 0-8240-8338-5. STEVE STURDY STEVE STURDY Welcome Unit for the History of MedicineManchester Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social History of Medicine, Volume 4, Issue 3, December 1991, Page 559, https:…
The germs of a new enlightenment
Historical Perspectives on the Role of the MRC
Science, Scientific Management, and the Transformation of Medicine in Britain c . 1870–1950
L'A. souligne les aspects de la transformation culturelle de la medecine qui ont conduit a l'emergence du corporatisme medical entre 1870 et 1950 en Angleterre
A Time to Heal
Journal Article ‘A Time to Heal’: The Diffusion of Listerism in Victorian Britain Jerry L. Gaw Get access Steve Sturdy Steve Sturdy University of Edinburgh Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume 115, Issue 463, September 2000, Pages 1009–1010, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/115.463.1009 Published: 01 September 2000
Gentlemen, Scientists and Doctors
"Gentlemen, Scientists and Doctors: Medicine at Cambridge 1800-1940, by Mark W. Weatherall." Canadian Journal of History, 37(1), pp. 172–173
Making Medicine Scientific
John Burdon Sanderson is usually remembered as one of the first generation of British experimental physiologists. He was professor of practical physiology and histology at University College, London, from 1870; the first Jodrell Professor of Physiology at the same institution from 1874; and the first Waynflete Professor of Physiology at the University of Oxford from 1882. He did much to introduce continental methods of laboratory teaching and res…
Scientific Method for Medical Practitioners
The appointment of James Lorrain Smith as first full-time professor of pathology at the University of Edinburgh in 1912 led to a series of reforms in pathology teaching there. Most significant was the inception of what Lorrain Smith called the "case method of teaching pathology," which used the investigation of clinical cases as the basis for a series of exercises in clinico-pathological correlation. This paper examines the social and cognitive o…
Knowing Cases
This paper examines the scientific work of the Laboratory of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh from its foundation in 1887 to 1920. It looks in particular at the pivotal role of clinical cases in the work of the Laboratory, using the concept of 'triangulation' to analyse how cases served both as objects of scientific knowledge and as sites for articulating and aligning the concerns of medical practitioners and career scientists. It goe…
So Long, Succor
So Long, Succor Steve Sturdy (bio) Dr. Golem is the third in a series of books by Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch that aim to make the insights of science and technology studies (STS) accessible to general readers.1 The Golem, the first of the series, consisted of a number of chapters based on prominent case studies in the social construction of scientific knowledge and highlighted the various contingencies and uncertainties inherent in the work o…
Looking for Trouble
The relationship between the pursuit of science and the practice of medicine has been a theme of abiding interest among medical historians. For the past 30 years or so, historians have characterised that relationship largely in terms of divergence, tension and conflict. My contention is that that tension has been over-stated. In this paper, I show how the narrative of conflict came to dominate historians ’ accounts of science–medicine relations, …
The Meanings of ‘Life
In the course of his somewhat unorthodox career in science, the physiologist John Scott Haldane occasionally turned to biography to portray the aims and values that he associated with such a career. But the same concerns can also be discerned in his scientific writings which drew, in large part, on experiments he conducted on himself. For Haldane, biology, as the science of life, was inseparable from biography, as the depiction of a life in scien…
Stakeholder Consultation as Social Mobilization
Public and stakeholder consultation is increasingly important in the policy process, both in the UK and elsewhere. Social scientists have considered consultation primarily in terms of how it relates to decision‐making – either as a means of involving a wider constituency of actors in the decision‐making process, or as a means of legitimizing the decisions taken by policymakers. This article shows that consultation can also serve a rather differen…
Recovery in Scotland
“Recovery” has become a key element in Scottish mental health policy and practice, despite continuing uncertainty over just what is meant by the term. This article draws on social movement theory to explore the processes underlying the growth of recovery in Scotland. Based on documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews with key actors, it looks at the emergence of a “recovery movement” in Scotland and in particular at how that movement ar…
Making Knowledge for International Policy
Journal Article Making Knowledge for International Policy: WHO Europe and Mental Health Policy, 1970–2008 Get access Steve Sturdy, Steve Sturdy * *Correspondence to Dr Steve Sturdy, Science, Technology and Innovation Studies, University of Edinburgh, Old Surgeon's Hall, High School Yards, Edinburgh EH1 1LZ, Scotland. Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Richard Freeman, Richard F…
Genetics and the Sociology of Identity
No description available
Knowledge in policy
Suspect technologies
The entanglement of border control technologies and immigration policies and practices with discourses of race, national identity and belonging has long been a focus of scholarly interest. In this paper we discuss the Human Provenance Pilot Project (HPPP), the aim of which was to evaluate the utility of genetic and isotope testing to corroborate asylum seekers' accounts of their nationality. We subject the HPPP to a detailed socio-technical analy…
Biotechnology and the transformation of vaccine innovation
The approval, from 1986, of a series of recombinant hepatitis B vaccines was a landmark both in the growth of biotechnology and in the development of the vaccine innovation system. In this paper, we show how the early development of the hepatitis B vaccines was shaped by a political and economic context that newly favoured commercialisation of academic research, including the appropriation and management of intellectual property; we elucidate the…
Local mutations
Popular and scientific accounts of the molecularisation of cancer typically attribute it to advances in laboratory science, particularly molecular geneticists. However, historical research has indicated that clinical expertise input was often vital for advancing such work. The present paper reinforces that view. Looking in detail at British research into the molecular genetics of familial cancers during the 1980s and 1990s, it shows that that res…
Domesticating models
Our article traces the representation of pandemic modelling in UK print media from the emergence of Covid-19 to the early stages of implementing the first UK-wide lockdown in late March 2020. Covid modelling, it is widely assumed, has shaped policy decisions and public responses to the pandemic in unprecedented ways. We analyse how the UK print media has configured modelling as a significant evidence tool in the representation of the pandemic. In…
Multidisciplinary perspectives on the regulation of diagnostic technologies
Framing utility
Before about 1990, insofar as diagnostic and other medical tests were subject to regulatory oversight, it was chiefly to ensure that they met appropriate standards of analytic and clinical validity. Over the course of the 1990s, however, regulatory reformers in the United States began to argue that genetic tests, specifically, should also be assessed to determine whether or not they actually benefit those undergoing testing-whether they possess "…
Sociology (19 works) · Political science (16 works) · Law (13 works) · Epistemology (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Medicine (10 works) · History (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · History (6 works)