Harry WU 吳易叡 (Early Career Fellow)
Fields of study:
history of medicine
science, technology and society (STS)
medical humanities
Profile:
Dr. Harry Yi-Jui WU (吳易叡) is currently Director and Assistant Professor of the Medical Ethics and Humanities Unit, Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, The University of Hong Kong. Before becoming a historian, he was trained as a physician in Taiwan. While he was at Oxford, he was Clifford Norton Student in the History of Science at The Queen’s College. After obtaining a DPhil in Modern History from The University of Oxford in 2012, Harry took up his first job at the Centre for Humanities and Medicine at the University of Hong Kong as a postdoc fellow and has ever since devoted himself to research and education in medical humanities. In 2013, he became the founding faculty to develop medical humanities curricula at the newly established medical school of Nanyang Technological University. In 2015, he returned to Hong Kong to take up his current position.
He has written on the transnational history of psychiatry related to the WHO’s mental health projects, the formation of psychiatric disciplines in Taiwan, China and Hong Kong and co-edited several related special issues. His monograph, Mad by the Millions: Mental Disorders and the Early Years of the World Health Organization, will be soon published by MIT Press. Currently, he is writing the history of mental health along the development of trade ports in East and Southeast Asia between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries, focusing on the relationship between migration and empires’ networks. Apart from mental health, Harry has also been exploring a wide range of medically-related topics, such as the history of hospice among overseas Chinese communities, politics of hazard exposure and health impacts, and medical education. He has also been contributing essays to medical journals, such as The Lancet series.