Prof. Dr. Jolien Gijbels

Jolien Gijbels is assistant professor of History at the Free University of Brussels (Vrije Universiteit Brussel). In 2021, she defended her PhD thesis on religion, medical ethics and difficult births in nineteenth-century Belgium at KU Leuven. Subsequently, she was a postdoctoral fellow at KU Leuven and a Fulbright and BAEF visiting scholar at the Department of the History of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University. In early 2023, she will be a Junior Fellow at the Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of Science at Utrecht University. Her research interests include the history of medicine, gender and technology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She currently examines the development of gynecological surgery and changing doctor-patient relationships around 1900. She has published on the history of obstetric dilemmas, reproductive surgery and the relationship between medicine and religion.