Caitjan Gainty

Caitjan is a historian of twentieth century medicine and technology, particularly interested in the systematisation of medicine and health care. It is not unusual for her to focus on projects that, while historically rich and significant in their own right, also offer a new lens through which to encounter contemporary health care questions.

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Caitjan's first book The Product of Medicine: How Efficiency Made American Health Care (Duke University Press, 2025) presents a history of early twentieth century American medicine as steeped in industrial practices and mores. In particular, it weaves medicine back into the seismic historical shifts in production and consumption which took place over this period, and it ultimately proposes that, like so many Model T’s standardised for ease and speed of assembly and dissemination across the country, medicine’s current products, the care and cure we so strongly associate with medicine today, came about not because they reflected the discovery of medicine as a moral agent charged with protecting the sanctity of human health, but because they were values that lent themselves to easy production and distribution. The book enters into discussions concerning health care policy and the politics of ‘Medicare for All’ as universal health care has been called in the United States.

In 2019-2020, she led the Wellcome-Trust funded project ‘Healthy Scepticism: Using History to Rethink Healthcare’, which examined the role of scepticism in medical knowledge making processes, from its position as a methodological stance among medical and scientific communities meant to further knowledge in the clinic and lab, to its role as a marker of distrust for medical and scientific authority. Caitjan's second book, Healthy Scepticism: Tales of Doubt, Dissent and Distrust in Medicine, draws on the project and was published on June 2026 with Hurst Publishers.

The project's public-looking approach included collaborations with artists, medical practitioners and historians, and produced several public engagement activities such as a workshop (2020), the HS Film Festival (2021) and the UTI Documentary (made by Agnes Arnold-Firster, Rita Maria Conry and Gemman Duncan).

Caitjan has interests in medical films and filmmaking in the 20th century, television and other medical media, medical aesthetics. She is interested in the recent history of telemedicine and the more general significance of medical technologies and instrumentation over the recent past and present.