Graduate Student Profile: Francesca Gibson
Francesca Gibson is a 2nd year PhD student in History and a 2025-26 Summer Pathways Fellow. With this support, Francesca conducted archival research at the Bodleian Libraries and Wellcome Collection in England, furthering her scholarship on the pre-history of hysteria in the 17th- and 18th-century British Atlantic World. We caught up with Francesca about her time in the archives and her upcoming research plans.
Hi Francesca! Great to chat with you about your ongoing research. To begin, can you give us an overview of your research? Who are some of the faculty members you are working with?
Hi! Thank you for the opportunity to share more about my work. Broadly speaking, I study the history of science and medicine in the early modern period, with a particular focus on the Atlantic World. My current research, supported by THI, examines the pre-history of hysteria in the 17th- and 18th-century British Atlantic World. I’m interested in how material and textual cultures shaped early ideas about gendered mental disorder and how those ideas continue to influence us today.
One of the arguments I’m developing is that the modern language of “the right to choose” can be traced back to early medical debates about pre-hysteria and Enlightenment discussions of rationality. After all, questions of choice always imply questions of power—who is deemed capable of making decisions, the state or the individual—and these questions are rooted in historical assumptions about mental capacity. I am fortunate to work closely with my advisors, Dr. Benjamin Breen and Dr. Gregory O’Malley, as I develop this research into the foundation for my dissertation.
It’s so great to learn more about your work. Can you share a little bit about how you came to be interested in the history of madness?
My background is in both history and psychology—I earned a BA in History and a BS in Psychology from the College of Charleston. My love of both fields led me to the history of science and medicine, as it gives me an avenue to explore the ways that history and psychology can inform one another. I even still collaborate with Dr. Anthony Bishara, one of my psychology professors from Charleston, on research about the Shuttle Challenger Disaster and how people make decisions with data (so my psychology research brain isn’t entirely dormant!).
Studying this period reminds me why history matters—it helps us understand how we got here and why certain debates, like those around mental health and choice, are still with us.
This interdisciplinary background naturally led me to explore how ideas about the mind and brain have changed over time. My work on pre-hysteria reflects my curiosity about the cultural and intellectual frameworks that shaped early understandings of mental disorder—and how those frameworks still influence us today. I find the 17th and 18th centuries particularly compelling because the Enlightenment brought such profound cultural, social, and medical shifts, laying the groundwork for the modern Western world. Studying this period reminds me why history matters—it helps us understand how we got here and why certain debates, like those around mental health and choice, are still with us.
As a THI Summer Pathways Fellow, you visited England to explore the collections in the British archives. I imagine this was a fascinating process! Can you tell us about the research you conducted there? Were there any specific texts or materials from your archival research that stood out to you in particular?
During my time in England, I had the incredible opportunity to work with the collections at the Wellcome Collection and the Bodleian Libraries. I went in looking for evidence of how “elite” physicians conceptualized mental disorder and reproduction in the 17th and 18th centuries—and just as importantly, how women themselves sought to manage their mental and reproductive health. I spent my days immersed in recipe books, lecture notes, treatises, and even personal letters. It was an amazing experience to see how these different types of sources spoke to one another.
I was especially captivated by the recipe books, most of which were compiled by women. They offered an intimate glimpse into the health concerns of families and small communities. Patterns in the entries, like the repeated inclusion of a cure for deafness in one ear, revealed which ailments were most pressing. Even the handwriting told a story; one recipe book, written in a noticeably shaky script, made me wonder if the author was experiencing tremors.
I was also drawn to the patient records of Simon Forman and Richard Napier, astrologers and physicians whose roughly 80,000 surviving case notes make up one of the largest medical archives from the 1600s. Reading these cases was fascinating, and often quite moving, as they revealed women reporting mental distress alongside reproductive issues and laid bare the very real dangers of childbirth in the early modern world.
How do you plan to build on your archival research in England to meet your thesis and future dissertation goals? I understand that the British archives are one site of a potentially broader, multi-sited research project that will incorporate materials from other archives. Can you share a little more about some of the other archives you plan to explore?
My long-term goal is to situate experiences of madness and reproduction within the broader context of the Atlantic World. The work I’ve done in England lays the foundation for this project, but I’m excited to expand my focus to the American colonies, where questions of race and enslavement are central to the history of reproductive rights. In narrowing my scope, I have decided to focus on the British colonies rather than include Spanish colonial sources (which I had originally mentioned in my THI application), allowing for a more coherent geographic frame.
To pursue this expanded research, I plan to examine collections at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University and the U.S. National Archives, both of which contain colonial-era materials related to enslaved people’s lives. Additionally, the Huntington Library’s Longo Collection and the University of Toronto’s Drake pediatrics and obstetrics collections will provide critical insights into the experience of birth in colonial America. Together, these archives will allow me to trace connections between madness, reproduction, and race across the Atlantic World and build toward a dissertation that moves between England and its colonies.
For our last question, what was something you found in the archives that was fascinating but maybe not relevant to your research?
While examining recipe books, I came across a recipe that called for a “dead man’s skull, never hanged,” which I found fascinating. I was aware of the use of mummies for medicine in Victorian England, but I had encountered fewer references to other forms of medical cannibalism. Discovering this recipe made me wonder how people thought about the body — not just as something to be healed, but as something that could do the healing. Though not directly related to my current project, I would love to explore the history of the body as medicine in future work.
Banner Image: A view of the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford. Photograph by Samuel Isaacs. All other photographs were taken by Francesca Gibson.