Prof. Dr. Alison M. Downham Moore

Western Sydney University, Australia
History of Medicine

External Senior Fellow
Marie S. Curie FCFP Fellow
January – April 2020

Website

E-Mail: alison.moore@westernsydney.edu.au

Last Update: 31.08.2020

Curriculum Vitae

Alison M. Downham Moore is a conceptual and intellectual historian of medicine. She is Associate Professor of modern European history at Western Sydney University, Australia where she teaches historical methodology, history of sexuality and supervises doctoral and masters candidates on a broad range of historical topics. She has published widely on the history of psychiatry and on the long history of sexuality and medicine. She also writes about historical theory, genocide historiographic debates, and the history of European medical ideas about digestion. In recent years she has developed her training in biomedical sciences with a view to enriching her expertise in histories of biology, health, nutrition and disease. Her current research focuses on the history of medical ideas about menopause, andropause and ageing sexuality, and on the development of integrative humanistic and scientific collaborations relating to questions of ageing, longevity, diet and intestinal health.

Selected Publications

Alison M. Moore, Sexual Myths of Modernity: Sadism, Masochism and Historical Teleology. Lanham: Lexington Books [Rowman & Littlefield], 2015. ISBN: 978-0-7391-3077-3.
Peter Cryle and Alison Moore, Frigidity: An Intellectual History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. ISBN: 978-0-230-30345-4.
Alison M. Moore, Manon Mathias and Jørgen Valeur (eds), Microbial Ecology in Health and Disease, Volume 29 (2), Special issue on the Gut-Brain Axis in History and Culture, 2018: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/zmeh20/29/2
Manon Mathias and Alison M. Moore (eds), Gut Feeling and Digestive Health in Nineteenth-Century Literature, History and Culture. New York: Palgrave, 2018. ISBN 978-3-030-01857-3:
Alison M. Moore, Victorian Medicine Was Not Responsible for Repressing the Clitoris: Rethinking Homology in the Long History of Women’s Genital Anatomy. Signs: The Journal of Women in Culture and Society 44 (1) August 2018, 53-81. DOI: 10.1086/698277.

FRIAS Project

Sexual Ageing in the History of Medicine, 1774-2020

This project will provide an account of the different historical periods in changing medical concepts of menopause, andropause and related terms since the end of the 1700s. Understanding how ideas about ageing and sexuality have changed across history will help to nuance our current understandings, relevant to an increasing number of people in ageing populations. It will identify how the various medical concepts of sexual ageing emerged and will identify the origins of common contemporary expectations that sexual desire declines with age. It will consider both historical and contemporary forms of medical evidence, exploring how changing ideas and individual experiences of sexual ageing may be a product of both cultural attitudes and of the changing life-ways of bodies in Western modernity.