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Your Fertile Years - What You Need to Know to Make Informed Choices by Professor Joyce Harper
Your Fertile Years - What You Need to Know to Make Informed Choices by Professor Joyce Harper

Your Fertile Years

When Joyce was in her twenties she started working in the field of fertility and she often had conversations with friends about their bodies and their fertility.  At this time she read ‘Ourbody, ourselves’ and felt it was a book that every woman should read…

Buy a copy of Your Fertile Years here

Your Joyful Years

In Your Joyful Years, Professor Joyce Harper provides an empowering, evidence-based guide to thriving beyond 50. Moving past the menopause, this book reframes later life as a vibrant new beginning—a time to rediscover purpose and prioritise self-care. Combining 40 years of scientific expertise with the candid wisdom of 50 inspiring women, Professor Harper offers a reassuring roadmap to health, happiness, and living authentically. This is the essential second book in her life-stage trilogy, proving that your best years are still to come.

Buy a copy of Your Joyful Years here
Season 3 / Episode 10 – 14 May

Lucy Ward – What Catherine the Great did with her body

In this podcast Professor Joyce Harper will be interviewing guests to discuss all things health related and debunking some of the many myths around our health.

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Lucy Ward is a writer and journalist. Growing up near Manchester, she studied Early and Middle English at Oxford University, before becoming a journalist first working on education for The Independent then becoming a Lobby correspondent for The Guardian.  She spent over five years at Westminster, campaigning for greater female representation, securing the first Lobby job-share and discovering that you could climb to the illuminated roof of the Palace and project your dancing shadow onto Big Ben.

After a few years in Russia, she worked as a Communications Manager at the University of Cambridge, where she developed her interest in communicating complex research for lay audiences. Her first book is The Empress and the English Doctor which was shortlisted for the Pushkin House Book Prize 2022.

Welcome to another podcast in the mini-series on Female Icons.

During a chance meeting in the school playground, Lucy discovered a compelling story she felt driven to share — how Catherine the Great joined forces with a Quaker doctor from Essex to lead a groundbreaking public health campaign introducing smallpox inoculation in Russia. Catherine invited Dr. Thomas Dimsdale to St Petersburg on a secret mission that would ultimately change both their lives. It was an extraordinary act of bravery to undergo the inoculation herself before asking others to do the same

Lucy began writing this book just before the COVID-19 outbreak — timing that could have been disastrous but instead proved serendipitous. The contemporary debates around vaccination echoed those of Catherine’s time, where science, politics, and personal risk intersected in powerful ways.

Despite the early death of her husband, Catherine defied expectations to become one of the greatest monarchs in history.

Professor Joyce Harper

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