Student Blog Issue #7: Mayah Monthrope shares her research and recounts her experiences on the HMS course.
My interest in health equity began with a focus on the systems that structure everyday life—particularly how their failures reveal disparities in protection, access, and health outcomes. This became concrete when I encountered U.S. maternal mortality data showing that Black women are significantly more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications. As an Afro-Caribbean woman, this disparity felt both immediate and personal, and prompted a broader set of questions about who is protected by public health systems and who is not.
During my undergraduate studies, majoring in the History of Science and Medicine. I pursued these questions through both policy and historical analysis. While working as a research assistant at the Yale School of Public Health, I spent two years helping to build a legal epidemiology dataset on flavored e-cigarette regulations across U.S. jurisdictions, examining how policy design can leave certain populations vulnerable. I also conducted research with the Anti-Eugenics Collective at Yale, reckoning with the university’s role in the Eugenics Movement. Joining with my interest in reproduction, my undergraduate thesis research focused on legal foundations of twentieth-century eugenic sterilization policies and their ongoing impact.
At Cambridge, I have sought to deepen this work by tracing its implications throughout the medical humanities. I applied to the M. Phil in Health, Medicine, Society because of the disciplines it spans – History, Philosophy, Sociology, and Anthropology. I have been so happy to dive into the four disciplines, writing essays in each!
In the Philosophy and Ethics of Medicine module, I jumped at the first opportunity to write in a new discipline. I am curious about how large international NGOs choose, amidst so many disasters globally, to render aid to those in need. My first paper looks into the ethics of medical aid distribution in resource-limited settings, comparing different philosophies and utilizing legal theories to lend credence to my argument.
While taking the Sociology of Reproduction module, I decided to write my second essay as a foray into medical sociology. I used digital research methods to study the perspectives of Black-American women who worked as surrogates. While ethical debates on surrogacy are extensive, the perspectives of the women themselves are often absent. Given the history of racialized reproductive labor in the United States, I wanted to focus on how Black surrogates understand and navigate their work. Writing this essay helped crystallize that I wanted to write my dissertation about the history of reproduction.
Based on the Aging in the Contemporary World Medical Anthropology module, I examined cryonics for my third essay. I chose cryonics as a case study through which to examine the anthropology of death. Focusing on a niche community committed to preserving bodies at extremely low temperatures with the hope of future revival, I analyzed the political and cultural assumptions embedded in these practices.
My dissertation returns to my home discipline in History of Medicine. My research began in the archives. At Cambridge University’s Churchill College, I consulted the papers of Sir Robert Edwards, the pioneer of IVF and co-founder of Bourn Hall Clinic in Cambridge, the world's first IVF clinic. Among these materials are ethics committee reports produced at Bourn Hall, offering a window into the earliest institutional deliberations over the ethics of assisted reproduction in the world. Additionally, correspondence between the Bourn Hall Ethics Committee and the Interim Licensing Authority for Human In Vitro Fertilisation and Embryology (ILA) shows the difficulty in navigating ethical issues and defining boundaries.
I focus on the development of ethical frameworks within these institutions and the social assumptions embedded in them. What responsibilities did Bourn Hall assign to itself? Which issues were considered within its remit, and which were not?
For example, it is curious how little space race occupies within these documents. Race is prominent in the media and the market — in donor catalogues that sort by ethnicity and in the racialised marketing of reproductive services. Race is operative in clinical and market settings. Yet, ethical frameworks and policy documents that set the terms for how reproduction is governed do not attend to it. Why does race, which is so present elsewhere, fail to register as an ethical complication in these documents? What assumptions about race, nation, and the body are so naturalised that they require no explicit articulation? And what work does that silence do?
I am excited to complete my dissertation and use it as a springboard for future endeavors. I aim to use this research as a foundation for work at the intersection of medicine and law. Building on my training in legal epidemiology and the medical humanities, I hope to examine how legal systems and individual institutions shape health outcomes. Ultimately, I hope to contribute to efforts that more equitably distribute protection, access, and care.
