Mary Souter PhD

 

Public Health in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland: a Study of Inverness County, 1845-1912

Supervised by Dr Jim MacPherson and Dr Elizabeth Ritchie

Mary graduated from the University of the Highlands and Islands in 2013 with a first class BA (Hons) in Scottish History. She became interested in the history of health in the Highlands and Islands when undertaking research for her undergraduate dissertation on Inverness District Lunatic Asylum in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After completing a module from the Strathclyde/Glasgow Caledonian Universities MSc in Health History course called Health and Healthcare in the Long Nineteenth Century, she began a PhD with UHI in 2015. The research focused on public health in the Highlands and Islands from 1845 when the government began to a play a more active role in people’s health up to 1912 when the Dewar Commission marked the beginning of more radical health interventions. Mary was particularly interested in how public health issues and solutions in the most northerly counties differed from other parts of Scotland and considered geographical, social, technical and economic circumstances.