The Best Country to Give Birth?

Linda Bryder gained her MA (1st Class Hons) at the University of Auckland in 1980, and her DPhil in the history of science at the University of Oxford in 1985. Her doctoral thesis was published as Below the Magic Mountain: A Social History of Tuberculosis in Twentieth-Century Britain (1988). Linda held a research fellowship at The Queen’s College, Oxford, from 1984 to 1988, and was awarded a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellowship in 1987.

Since returning to New Zealand in 1988, Linda has taught history at the University of Auckland and in 2008 was appointed professor. She has an extensive publication list in the social history of health and medicine, including over one hundred peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, and significant monographs in the history of women and children’s health, including A Voice for Mothers: The Plunket Society and Infant Welfare, 1907–2000 (2003), A History of the ‘Unfortunate Experiment’ at National Women’s Hospital (2009) and The Rise and Fall of National Women’s Hospital: A History (2014).

In 2014 she was awarded an inaugural University of Auckland Research Excellence Award. From 2007 to 2023 she held an honorary chair at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand Te Apārangi. A founding editor of the Oxford journal Social History of Medicine, Linda has served on the editorial board of several international medical history journals and co-edits the New Zealand Journal of History. She is currently President of the Australian and New Zealand Society of the History of Medicine.