Media and Bookings
For media enquiries, interviews, collaborations, or speaking engagements, please use the contact form below. Assets and press details are available here.
About Sinéad Spearing
Media & Consulting
Sinéad Spearing is a medical historian, author, and folklorist specialising in early English healing traditions — particularly the women who practised medicine before medicine forgot them. With a background in psychology and philosophy, she brings a unique lens to the intersection of body, spirit, and story.
Her work has been featured in Watkins Magazine, PsychTalk, and praised by scholars including Professor Jacalyn Duffin of the Natural History Museum. She has spoken at The British Society of Pharmacology, The Old Operating Theatre Museum in London, and regularly consults on historical research for writers, creatives, and producers.
Sinéad is available for interviews, guest speaking, and media appearances on topics relating to women’s history, Anglo-Saxon medicine, medical folklore, and the spiritual dimensions of healing.
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Talk & Interview Topics
1. The Forgotten Physicians: Reviving the Women Behind the Witch Trials
How folk healers, herbalists, and midwives were erased from medical history — and why remembering them isn’t just historical, but radical.
2. Cunning Woman: A Novel Rooted in Witch Trials, Exile, and Return
Inspired by a real 1656 witch trial in her home village, Sinéad’s historical novel reimagines what it means to be cast out, both then and now.
3. Breath and Bramble: Healing Through Story, Memory, and Soil
An intimate glimpse into Sinéad’s forthcoming memoir — exploring personal trauma, ancestral echoes, and the journey back to sacred feminine knowledge.
4. Women, Wisdom, and the Old English Mind
Why do ancient remedies still matter? A deep dive into the psychological, spiritual, and medical knowledge found in early English texts — including the one now shown to cure MRSA.
5. Advising the Past: How to Get Women’s Medical History Right on Screen
Available for documentary and period drama consultation, Sinéad brings historical accuracy and soul to portrayals of early medicine, women’s knowledge, and folkloric healing. From Anglo-Saxon texts to seventeenth-century cunning women, she helps ensure the past is brought to life with truth and care.
🌿 Current Research: Rediscovering Remedies
Sinéad is currently undertaking original research into the efficacy and pharmacological structure of Old English herbal remedies — many of which have long been dismissed as superstition, despite their recorded use over centuries.
Building on the landmark discovery that one such remedy, found in Bald’s Leechbook, can cure MRSA where modern antibiotics fail, her work focuses on the wider medicinal intelligence hidden in these texts. She brings a rare combination of skills to this research, drawing on her experience translating Old English manuscripts — including Bald’s Leechbook III and Lacnunga — alongside historical, contextual, and folkloric analysis.
Sinéad’s aim is to recover, evaluate, and, where possible, revive some of these forgotten formulations — particularly those that may still hold relevance for contemporary health and wellbeing. Her work also explores the psychological and ritual dimensions of healing as practised by the early English cunning folk.
She is currently seeking:
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Conversations and collaborations with researchers, herbalists, pharmacologists, and folklorists
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Support from funders or institutions with an interest in folk medicine, women’s knowledge, and cultural recovery
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Dialogue with practitioners working with plant-based and ancestral healing traditions today
If you’re interested in contributing to or supporting this work, please reach out via the contact form below.