ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Participants: Remembering the Auckland Steroid Trial

• In Event: Listening Otherwise: Epistemic Justice and Methods of Research Participation in Histories of Reproductive Biomedicine

English Abstract

This paper situates the Auckland Steroid Trial within the broader methodological turn toward participant-centred and ethically reflexive oral history practice. Building on this ethos, the paper reflects on how such methods can reshape historical research on clinical medicine and research participation in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Using the Auckland Steroid Trial as a case study, we explore how participation in research extends well beyond the timeframe of the original 19769–1974 trial at National Women’s Hospital, which investigated the use of antenatal corticosteroids to improve newborn survival. Decades later, the trial continues to generate new forms of participation through memory, storytelling, and archival recovery.

Drawing on oral histories, we consider how clinicians, researchers, mothers, and their now 50-year-old children reconstruct their experiences and contribute to a growing archive of both the trial and clinical research more broadly. We suggest that remembering itself becomes a participatory act, one that embodies the ethical, emotional, and social dimensions of medical research and underscores the ongoing responsibilities of researchers to collaborate with, rather than simply record, those whose lives shape these histories.

Author

• Charlotte Greenhalgh, University of Waikato