John "Jack" Goulder

Research Interests: History of psychiatry; history of diagnosis; medical anthropology; history of bioethics; philosophy of science; anthropology of ethics.

I completed an AM in History of Science in spring of 2025. I am a writer and medical doctor working in psychiatry. I have a background in social anthropology. I am principally interested in the history of psychiatry, how it faced a series of critiques during the twentieth century, and how these came to shape the discipline’s own understanding of ethics and meaning in its work. In extension to this, I am looking to study the development of medicine as a profession more broadly, its claims to expertise over certain domains of knowledge and activity, and how these have been contested and changed in the face of recurrent crises in public trust. I want to give an account of ethical change in medicine, the substrates and conditions that drive it, and how in the twentieth century these changes interact and interfere with our concepts of expertise and knowledge.

Previous Degrees:

University of Cambridge, BA, Human, Social & Political Sciences
University College London, MBBS, Medicine