Welch Medal Winners

healing with poisonsCongratulations to Yan Liu, winner of the 2023 Welch Medal for his book Healing with Poisons: Potent Medicines in Medieval China (University of Washington Press, 2021)

Past Welch Winners

2022

Jaipreet Virdi, Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History (University of Chicago Press, 2020)

2021

Benjamin Breen, The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019)

2020

Nicole Barnes, Intimate Communities: Wartime Healthcare and the Birth of Modern China, 1937-1945 (University of California Press, 2018)

2019

Pablo Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (University of North Carolina Press, 2017)

2018

Cristian Berco, From Body to Community: Venereal Disease and Society in Baroque Spain (University of Toronto Press, 2016)

2017
Johanna Schoen, Abortion After Roe: Abortion After Legalization (University of North Carolina Press, 2015)

2016
Sean Hsiang-Lin Lei, Neither Donkey Nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle Over China’s Modernity (University of Chicago Press, 2014)

2015
Leslie J. Reagan, Dangerous Pregnancies: Mothers, Disabilities, and Abortion in Modern America (University of California Press, 2010)

2014
Julia Livingston, Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic (Duke, University Press, 2012)

2013
Michael Willrich, Pox: An American History (Penguin Press, 2011)

2012
Gregg Mitman, Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes (Yale University Press, 2007)

2011
Allan M. Brandt, The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America (Basic Books, 2007)

2010
Warwick Anderson
The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen (The Johns Hopkins University Press: 2008)

2009
Katharine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (Zone Books, 2006)

2008
Frank M. Snowden, The Conquest of Malaria: Italy, 1900-1962 (New Haven: Yale University Press 2006)

2007
Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meaning of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004)

2006
Barron Lerner, Breast Cancer Wars: Hope, Fear, and the Pursuit of a Cure in Twentieth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001)

2005
Keith Wailoo, Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001)

2004
Kenneth Ludmerer, Time to Heal: American Medical Education from the Turn of the Century to the Era of Managed Care (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)

2003
Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (London: Harper Collins, 1997)

2002
Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

2001
Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (NY: Zone Books, 1999)

2000
W. Bruce Fye, American Cardiology: The History of a Specialty and its College (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996)

1999
Jack D. Pressman, Last Resort: Psychosurgery and the Limits of Medicine (Cambridge University Press, 1998)

1998
Mary Lindemann, Health and Healing in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995)

1997
Harold J. Cook, Trials of an Ordinary Doctor: Joannes Groenevelt in Seventeenth-Century London (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994)

1996
Gerald L. Geison, The Private Science of Louis Pasteur (Princeton University Press, 1995)

1995
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale (NY: Knopf, distributed by Random House, 1990)

1994
Michael R. McVaugh, Medicine Before the Plague: Practitioners and Their Patients in the Crown of Aragon, 1285-1345 (Cambridge University Press, 1993)

1993
Heinrich von Staden, Herophilus: The Art of Medicine in Ancient Alexandria (Cambridge University Press, 1989)

1992
Philip Curtin, Death by Migration (Cambridge University Press, 1989)

1991
John Harley Warner, The Therapeutic Perspective: Medical Knowledge and Identity in America, 1820-1855 (Harvard University Press, 1986)

1990
Rosemary Stevens, In Sickness and in Wealth: American Hospitals in the Twentieth Century (NY: Basic Books, 1989)

1989
Richard J. Evans, Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years, 1830-1910 (Oxford University Press, 1987)

1988
Guenter B. Risse, Hospital Life in Enlightenment Scotland: Care and Teaching at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh (Oxford University Press, 1987)

1987
James H. Cassedy, American Medicine and Statistical Thinking, 1800-1860 (Harvard University Press, 1984); and Medicine and American Growth, 1800-1860 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1986)

1986
Gerald N. Grob, The State and the Mentally Ill: A History of the Worcester State Hospital (University of North Carolina Press, 1966); and Mental Institutions in America (NY: Free Press, 1972); and Mental Illness and American Society, 1897-1940 (Princeton University Press, 1983)

1985
Nancy G. Siraisi, Taddeo Alderotti and His Pupils: Two Generations of Italian Medical Learning (Princeton University Press, 1981)

1984
Michael Bliss, The Discovery of Insulin (University of Chicago Press, 1982)

1983
Robert Frank, Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists: Scientific Ideas and Social Interaction (University of California Press, 1980)

1982
James Harvey Young, for scholarly contributions to the history of medicine

1981
Erna Lesky, for significant contributions to the history of medicine

1980
John Blake, for his valuable scholarly contributions to the history of medicine

1979
Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Medicine and Reform, 1626-1660 (NY: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1976, c1975)

1978
Frederick L. Holmes, Claude Bernard and Animal Chemistry: The Emergence of a Scientist (Harvard University Press, 1974)

1977
Lester S. King, ” for his scholarly contributions to the history of medicine”

1976
Lelland J. Rather, Addison and the White Corpuscles (University of California Press, 1972); and Mind and Body in Eighteenth-Century Medicine (University of California Press, 1965); and for “his important continuing studies in the history of medicine”

1975
George W. Corner, for invaluable contributions

1974
Walter Pagel, for extensive and most valuable publications

1973
Margaret Tallmadge May, Galen on the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body (Cornell University Press, 1968)

1972
Erwin H. Ackerknecht, Medicine at the Paris Hospital, 1794-1848 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962)

1971
Charles Donald O’Malley, (posthumously) for scholarly contributions

1970
No award

1969
Charles Rosenberg, The Cholera Years (University of Chicago Press, 1962)

1968
Saul Benison, Tom Rivers: Reflections on a Life in Medicine and Science (M.I.T. Press, 1967)

1967
Howard B. Adelman, Marcello Malpighi and the Evolution of Embryology (Cornell University Press, 1966)

1966
Whitfield J. Bell, Jr., John Morgan: Continental Doctor (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965)

1965
No award

1964
No award

1963
Saul Jarcho, for scholarly contributions

1962
Genevieve Miller, The Adoption of Inoculation for Smallpox in England and France (University of Kentucky Press, 1960)

1961
George Rosen, for contributions to the social history of medicine

1960
Richard H. Shryock, for scholarly contributions

1959
No award

1958
Charles F. Mullett, The Bubonic Plague and England: An Essay in the History of Preventive Medicine (University of Kentucky Press, 1956)

1957
No award

1956
Lyman Henry Butterfield, Letters of Benjamin Rush (Princeton University Press, 1951)

1955
No award

1954
Jerome Pierce Webster and Martha Teach Gnudi, The Life and Times of Gaspare Tagliacozzi (New York: Reichner, 1950)

1953
Erwin H. Ackerknecht, for scholarly contributions

1952
Owsei Temkin, for scholarly contributions

1951
No award

1950
Henry E. Sigerist, for scholarly contributions

Genevieve Miller, “The Missing Seal,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 50 (1976):119, contains the titles or description of the works that were recognized before 1976.