The following articles are past winners of the Roy Porter essay prize. If you would like more details of upcoming deadlines for the prize, see the prizes page.
2021: Martijn van der Meer, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, ‘Sown without care: Dutch eugenicists and their call for optimising development conditions, 1919-1939’. (Not yet published in Social History of Medicine).
2020: John Beales, Keele University and the Imperial War Museums, ‘Of One Blood?’ Challenging perceptions of wartime blood donor motivation and behaviour: a case study of Bristol and the South West, 1939-1945’ (Not yet published in Social History of Medicine).
2019: Elizabeth Evens, UCL, ‘Playboy Yearbooks and the backlash to women’s increased presence in U.S. medical schools’ (Not yet published in Social History of Medicine)
2018: Mateusz Zatonski, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), ‘Lighting up under the “No Smoking” sign: tobacco control regulation in Communist Poland’ (Not yet published in Social History of Medicine)
2017: Kit Heintzman, Harvard University, ‘Bedrooms and Barnyards: Two Medicines in Revolutionary France’ (Not yet published in Social History of Medicine)
Click on the titles below to read these articles FREE online:
2016: Spencer Weinreich, University of Oxford
How (not) to survive a plague: The theology of fleeing disease in sixteenth-century England
2015: Rebecca Whiteley, UCL
Figuring Pictures and Picturing Figures: Images of the Pregnant Body and the Unborn Child in England, 1540-c.1680
2014: Erica Storm, Stanford University
Gilding the Pill: The Sensuous Consumption of Patent Medicines, 1815–1841
2013: Julie Hipperson, King’s College London
Professional entrepreneurs: Women veterinary surgeons as small business owners in interwar Britain
2012: Caitlin Mahar, The University of Melbourne
Easing the Passing: R v. Adams and Terminal Care in Postwar Britain
2011: Bradley Matthys Moore, University of Wisconsin
For the People’s Health: Ideology, Medical Authority, and Hygienic Science in Communist Czechoslovakia, 1952-62
2010: Seth LeJacq, Johns Hopkins University
The Bounds of Domestic Healing: Medical Recipes, Storytelling and Surgery in Early Modern England
2008: Mark Honigsbaum, University College London
The Great Dread: Cultural and Psychological Impacts and Reponses to the ‘Russian’ Influenza in the United Kingdom, 1889-1893
2007: Olivia Weisser, Johns Hopkins University
Boils, Pushes, and Wheals: Reading Bumps on the Body in Early Modern England
2006: Matthew Smith, University of Exeter
Psychiatry Limited: Hyperactivity and the Evolution of American Psychiatry, 1957-80
2005: Beth Linker, Yale University
Feet for Fighting: Locating Disability and Social Medicine in First World War America
2004: Matthew Warner Osborn, University of California, Davis
Diseased Imaginations: Constructing Delirium Tremens in Philadelphia, 1813-1832
2003: Marianne Samayoa, University of Missouri-St. Louis
More Than Quacks: Seeking Medical Care in Late Colonial New Spain
Previous Prize Competitions
2002 Jeremy Greene (doctoral candidate MD/PhD Program, History of Science Dep., Harvard University). Therapeutic Infidelities: Noncompliance Enters the Medical Literature, 1955-1975. Student Essay Competition. Published in Social History of Medicine, Vol. 17, No. 3, December 2004, pp. 327-43
2001 Angela Montford (postgraduate research student, Dep. of Medieval History, University of St Andrews). Dangers and Disorders: The Decline of the Dominican Frater Medicus. Student Essay Competition. Published in Social History of Medicine, Vol. 16, No. 2, August 2003, pp. 169-91.
2000 Christian Bonah. ‘Experimental Rage’, the Development of Medical Ethics and the Genesis of Scientific Facts. Ludwig Fleck: An Answer to the Crisis of Modern Medicine in Interwar Germany? Millennium Essay Competition. Published in Social History of Medicine, Vol. 15, No. 2, August 2002, pp. 187-207.
2000 Lisa W. Smith. Reassessing the role of the family: Women’s Medical Care in Eighteenth-century England. Student Millennium Essay Competition. Published in Social History of Medicine, Vol. 16, No. 3, December 2003, pp. 327-42
1999 Susan Broomhall. ‘Women’s Little Secrets’: Defining the Boundaries of Reproductive Knowledge in the Sixteenth Century. Published in Social History of Medicine, Vol. 15, No. 1, April 2002, pp. 1-15.
1998 Patricia R. Stokes. Pathology, Danger, and Power: Women’s and Physicians’ Views of Pregnancy and Childbirth in Weimer Germany. Published in Social History of Medicine, Vol. 13, No.3, December 2000, pp.358-80.
1997 Lauren Kassell. How to Read Simon Forman’s Casebooks: Medicine, Astrology, and Gender in Elizabethan London. Published in Social History of Medicine, Vol. 12, No.1, April 1999, pp.3-18.
1996 Luke Davidson. ‘Identities Ascertained’: British Ophthalmology in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century. Published in Social History of Medicine, Vol. 9, No. 3, December 1996, pp.313-33.
1993 Bernadine Courtwright Barr. Entertaining and Instructing the Public: Dr John Zahorsky’s 1904 Incubator Institute. Published in Social History of Medicine, Vol. 8, No.1, April 1995, pp.17-36.
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