Deadline for entries is 1 February 2026.
Rules and Entry Form
The Society for the Social History of Medicine invites submissions to its 2025/6 Roy Porter Student Essay Prize Competition.
The Prize
One prize will be awarded for the best original and unpublished essay in the social history of medicine. The winner will be awarded £500 and will be offered the opportunity to deliver a plenary at the SSHM biennial conference. See our blog by previous winner Martijn van der Meer about his Roy Porter winning experience!
If the winner chooses to accept, they will be awarded free conference registration and, if eligible, awarded a travel/accommodation bursary in line with the Society’s scheme (either £240, £360, or £500, dependent on the distance travelling). Additional expenses will be considered but will need to be agreed in advance with the Treasurer of the Society.
Those shortlisted for the Roy Porter Prize will be awarded £100 each and, along with the winner, will be presented with prize certificates.
The winner and any shortlisted entrants will be offered publishing mentoring and guidance and may be invited to submit to the journal, Social History of Medicine (SHM), subject to the usual reviewing procedures. The journal publisher, Oxford University Press (OUP), kindly make the winning entry free to read for at least one year after publication in SHM.
SSHM is also pleased to roll out an exclusive Masterclass for all promising entries – whether they have been named winner or a commended entry or not. A journal Editor will take those entrants selected through the process of how publishing in academic journals works and how to work with Editors, and also offer tips and take questions on maximising the chances of successful publication.
ASSESSMENT PANEL
The Panel will consist of at least four people, including the Roy Porter Prize Chair, one of the Editors of SHM, and other members of the Executive Committee of the Society, with the assistance of members of the Editorial Board.
The Prize will not be awarded if the Panel considers that none of the essays reaches an acceptable standard.
Eligibility
- Undergraduate or postgraduate students, part-time or full-time either registered at the deadline for submission of entries or awarded their degree between 1 January 2025 and 31 December 2025.
- All entrants must be members of the Society by the date of submission and state their membership number on this entry form. You can join the Society by subscribing at https://academic.oup.com/shm. (The membership requirement may be waived for residents of those nations outlined on the OUP website, including countries in, for example, South America and Africa. Please contact the Executive Secretary for further guidance).
- Members of the Executive Committee of SSHM or the Editorial Board of Social History of Medicine may not enter the competition, even if otherwise eligible.
- Candidates who are uncertain as to their eligibility should contact the Executive Secretary sshmexecsec@gmail.com before preparing their entry.
Submission Rules
Essays must be:
- unpublished and not submitted to any other competition at the same time, nor already have won or been shortlisted or runner-up for a prize offered by anyone other than the entrant’s own university.
- original research and writing of the author.
- written in UK English.
- anonymous (authors must identify themselves only on the entry form stating SSHM membership number).
- 5000-9000 words in length (including footnotes).
- referenced and style in accordance with conventions of Social History of Medicine, available at http://shm.oxfordjournals.org under ‘Instructions for authors’ [NB keep entries to the competition wordcount specified above NOT the wordcount specified for article submissions to the journal].
- not previously submitted to this competition.
Entries for the Prize should be sent to the SSHM Executive Secretary sshmexecsec@gmail.com and consist of:
- a cover email stating clearly your name, preferred pronouns, contact details, eligibility for the Prize (see above section for details), where you study/studied for a PhD, and whether you are an independent scholar or university affiliated
- this entry form as a separate file (both 1 and 2 ensure your entry remains anonymous during judging). The signing of this form will be taken as the formal declaration of the entry being your own original research and writing.
- the anonymised essay as an attachment.
The deadline for receiving entries is: 1 February 2026
Announcement of the Winner
A decision will be made by June 2026 and the prize winner will be announced in summer 2026. All entrants will be notified of the outcome, but the panel regrets it is unable to provide feedback on unsuccessful entries.
For a list of previous winning entries and subsequent articles published in Social History of Medicine see the Roy Porter Prize Articles.
2024/5 Roy Porter Essay Prize Competition
One winning and two commended essays were selected from the anonymised entries:
The winner of the 2024/5 Prize is Charlotte Stobart (Centre for Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester). The winning essay title: ‘”She Types with her Toes”: Examining Experiences and Representations of Polio-Disability through The British Polio Fellowship Newsletter, The Bulletin, 1963-1973’.
Commended: Elena Danieli (Università di Bologna and Université Paris Cité),’Portraits of Art: Truth, Representations and Scientific Trajectories in French and British Obstetric Illustrations from Second Half of 18th Century’.
Commended: Zhilin Chu (Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge), ‘Vaccination of Dogs: Rabies Control and Colonial Rivalries in the Shanghai Concessions, 1920s-1940s’.
Congratulations to Charlotte, Elena and Zhilin. The winners, along with four other entrants, are invited to attend a Masterclass (online) with one of the co-editors of Social History of Medicine, offering advice and support to develop their essays for submission to the Society’s peer-reviewed journal.
2023/4 Roy Porter Essay Prize Competition
One winner and a highly commended and commended were selected from the anonymised entries:
The winner of the 2023/4 Prize is John Reginald Matchim (University of New Brunswick). The winning essay is titled: ‘“From the Mecca of Civilization to a Place like Labrador”: The Physicians’ and Surgeons’ Club of Columbia University and reordering health and space on Spotted Island, Labrador, 1912-1960’.
Highly commended: Tiphaine Lours (Sciences Po, France) for ‘The most horrible and disgusting infirmity that can afflict women’: A Pioneering Approach to Vesicovaginal Fistula Repairs in Paris (1830s-1840s)’.
Commended: Fu Ge Yang (University of Cambridge) for ‘Professionalisation through commerce: establishing jingshenxue as a legitimate psychiatric treatment in Republican China (1933 – 1937)’.
The year also saw a Masterclass event piloted for all promising entries – whether they have been named winner or a commended entry or not. In recognition of the high quality of the year’s entries, eight people were offered the opportunity. All responded positively and the feedback from those who were able to attend commented on its value to their writing and publishing ambitions.
2022 Roy Porter Student Essay Prize Competition
One winner and one shortlisted essay were selected from the anonymised entries.
The winner of the 2022 Prize is Anna Weerasinghe( Johns Hopkins). The winning essay is titled: ‘In the Kitchen with Brianda Jaoa: Tacit Practices and Technologies of Healing in Garcia de Orta’s Coloquios (1563)’
Shortlisted entries, which will also be invited to be submitted to the journal, were received from: Vesna Curlic (Edinburgh), ‘Returned to their Native Air: Migration, Disability and Climate in Britain, 1880-1905’; Silvia Maria Marchiori (Cambridge), who wrote on ‘Bridging Ancient and Humanist Medicine: The Early Medieval Manuscript of a Greek Speaking Latin Monk’.
2021 Roy Porter Student Essay Prize Competition
One winner and one shortlisted essay were selected from the anonymised entries.
The winner of the 2021 Prize is Martijn van der Meer (Erasmus University, Rotterdam). The winning essay is titled: ‘Sown without care: Dutch eugenicists and their call for optimising development conditions, 1919-1939’.
The entry shortlisted for the essay prize is ‘Searching for Care in a Segregated City: Detroit’s Black Hospitals and the Integration of American Healthcare 1945-75’, by Margaret Williams (now IRTA Fellow, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, National Institutes of Health, USA).
Congratulations to Martijn and Margaret!
2020 Roy Porter Student Essay Prize Competition
One winner and three shortlisted essays were selected from the anonymised entries.
Congratulations to this year’s Roy Porter Prize winner John Beales (Keele University and the Imperial War Museums) for his winning entry ‘Of One Blood?’ Challenging perceptions of wartime blood donor motivation and behaviour: a case study of Bristol and the South West, 1939-1945’.
Shortlisted entries, which will also be invited to be submitted to the journal, were received from: Marsha Wubbels (University of Exeter), ‘A Weighty Matter: understanding fatness, weight-watching and the ‘healthful Standard’ in eighteenth-Century England’; Lauren Killingsworth (Yale University), ‘“With Maps Illustrative of the Disease”: Medical Cartography in Late Nineteenth-Century Colonial India’; Vesna Curlic (Edinburgh), for her essay on ‘Returned to their Native Air: Migration, Disability and Climate in Britain, 1880-1905’.
2019 Roy Porter Student Essay Prize Competition
Congratulations to Elizabeth Evens (UCL) for her winning entry: ‘Playboy Yearbooks and the backlash to women’s increased presence in the U.S. medical schools’.
Shortlisted entries, which will also be invited to be submitted to the journal, were received from: Helen Esfandiary (KCL), “Nurture prevailes more than nature’: the role of preventative medicine in early modern child-rearing’; Sarah Murphy-Young (University of Leeds), ‘The ‘modern’ chemist’s window: material practice and professional advocacy in British retail pharmacy, 1920s-1930s’; and Kristin Brig (Johns Hopkins), ‘The economics of sick cows: the use of cows for smallpox vaccine lymph production, 1870s-1900s’.
2018 Roy Porter Student Essay Prize Winners
Congratulations to Mateusz Zatonski (LSHTM) for his winning entry: ‘Lighting up under the “No Smoking” sign: tobacco control regulation in Communist Poland’.
Shortlisted entries, which will also be invited to be submitted to the journal, were received from: Sara Caputo (Cambridge) for ‘Treating, preventing, feigning, concealing: sickness, agency and the medical culture of the Georgian naval sailor’; Jack Greatrex (HKU) for ‘The rat, the cow and the cockroach: Hong Kong and the vanishing animals of plague research’; and Brianne Wesolowski (Vanderbilt) for ‘Knowledge in motion: the practices, technologies and mentalities of Joseph H. Pilates’.
2017 Roy Porter Student Essay Prize Winners
Congratulations to Kit Heintzman (Harvard University), for her winning essay for the Roy Porter Prize 2017-18: ‘Bedrooms and Barnyards: Two Medicines in Revolutionary France’. The judges felt that this was ‘a very interesting and well-researched paper, which utilises the concept of One Health to pick apart relationships of scientific and healing communities within the state in Revolutionary France’.
Thanks to the other entrants also for the high standard of essays received. Due to the quality of their submissions, two other essays were also ‘highly commended’:
- Peder Clark (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine): ‘”Problems of today and tomorrow”: Prevention and the National Health Service in the 1970s’
- Michelle Webb (University of Exeter): ‘ “Spotted all over”: The afterlife of leprosy in Early Modern England’