2023 — Audrey Duquette, “All Work and No Play: The History of Recess and its Role in Child Development”
2022 — Daniel D. Castaneda, “‘Vendors of Death’: Sanitary Discourses and the Stigmatization of Street Food Vendors During Peru’s Cholera Epidemic, 1991-1993”
2021–Margo A. Peyton, ( Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine) “Segregated in Life and Death: Johns Hopkins and the Racial Science of Tuberculosis.” Honorable Mention: Aneek Patel (New York University Grossman School of Medicine) “Roots of Resistance: The Slave Midwife as an Agent of Slave Resistance in the Antebellum South.”
2020–Daniel Huang, (Queens University School of Medicine) “Cyber Solace: Historicizing an Online Forum for Depression 1990-1999.”
2019–Tiffany Kay Brocke, (Johns Hopkins University) “Race and Reputation: The Influence of the Johns Hopkins Hospital on Abortion Access in Baltimore, 1945-1973.”
Honorable mention: Christopher Magoon, (University of Pennsylvania) “Mao’s Pacifist ‘Friends’: The Friends Ambulance Unit and the Limits of Medical Humanitarianism in China”
2018–Helen Perry Knight, (John Hopkins University) “St. Luke’s Hospice: A Hospital’s Engagement in the American Hospice Movement”
2017–Christopher Sterwald, (Duke University Medical School), “Frosted Intellectuals: How Leo Kanner Constructed the Autistic Family”
First honorable mention: Sarah Tapp, (Emory University School of Medicine) “’Mothers, Mongols, and Mores’: Physician Advice to Parents of Newborns with Down Syndrome in the Mid 20th Century”
Second honorable mention: Matthew Edwards, (University of Texas Medical Branch School of Medicine), “Freedom House Ambulance Service: Race and the Rise of Emergency Medical Services, 1967-1975”
2016–Alyssa Botelho, (Harvard Medical School), “Adjudicating Genetic Surgery: An Investigation of Recombinant DNA Legacies in the CRISPR Gene-Editing Era”
2015–Julia Cockey Cromwell, (Johns Hopkins University),“Viral Knowledge: Autopsy and the 1918 Influenza Pandemic”
Honorable Mention: John Thomas Stroh, (University of Kansas School of Medicine, Class of 2014 and resident at the Children’s National Medical Center, Washington, DC) “The English Reformation and the Birth of London’s Royal Hospitals”
2014–Radu Dudas, (Johns Hopkins University),“Modeling the Good Surgeon: Images in Medieval Surgical Manuscripts”
Honorable Mention: Charlotte Nathalie Weisberg, (Thomas Jefferson University), “Deja Vu All Over Again: The movement to reform American Medical Education in the Years 1910-2010”
2013–Andrew Williams (Michigan State University College of Human Medicine), “An Unlikely Partnership: Organized Medicine’s Embrace of the Free Clinic Movement”
2012–Joy Liu (Brown University), “‘Herself a Mother’: Sarah Lucretia Robb and Motherly Medicine in the Late Nineteenth Century.”
2011–Vanessa Natalie Raabe (University of Minnesota), “The Sweating Sickness: A Food-Borne Toxin?”
Honorable mention: Adam Mark Fowler, ‘”To Smile in the Face of Grim Death’: Methodists and ‘Good Death’ in the Eighteenth-Century Britain.”
2010–Elliot Weiss “Avoiding the Controversial: United States Physicians’ Response to the Eugenic Social Policies, 1910-1940”
Honorable mention: Sarah Dolgonos Michael Winstead
2009—Davida Kornreich (New York University School of Medicine), “A debt repaid: Draper, Nativism and Dissection in New York State”
2008–Ronald W. Alfa (Stanford University School of Medicine), “Redefining Inert: The Birth of the Placebo in American Medicine”
Honorable mention: David P. Johnson (Duke University School of Medicine), “Dr. George W. Harley: A new perspective of a 20th century medical missionary’s influence on 21st century global health” Amanda V. Thornton (Dartmouth Medical School), “Coerced Care: Thomas Thistlewood’s account of medical practice on sugar plantation slaves in colonial Jamaica, 1751-1786.”
2007–Jennifer Segal (Harvard University), “Professors of the Pelvis: Teaching Medical Students the Art and Technique of Pelvic Examination”
Honorable mention: to Lee McCalla Hampton (U. of North Carolina), essay on Sabin
2006–Jesse Waggoner (Duke University), “The Role of the Physician: Eugene Sanger and a Standard of Care at the Elmira Prison Camp”
2005–Adam D. Lipworth (University of Pennsylvania), “The Waksman Campaign: Dr. Selman Waksman’s Struggle to Preserve His Heroic Image Through a Bitter Credit Dispute Over Streptomycin”
2004–Whitney Bryant (Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons), “Atoxyl and Human African Trypanosomiasis: a history of colonial chemotherapy”
Honorable mention: Ann Garment (New York University), “Mortui Vivos Docent – The Dead Teach the Living: The Rise of Body Bequeathal in 20th Century America”
2003–Walter N. Ingram (University of Kansas), “Integrators of the University of Kansas School of Medicine: a struggle in the 1930s”
Honorable mention: Kelly R. Brown (University of Rochester), “Trends in the admission of juveniles to insane asylums in England and Wales, 1870-1900”
2002–Shelley Day (Harvard University), “Fetal Surgery, Medical Ethics and Abortion Politics”
Honorable mention: Brian Puskas (Pennsylvania State University), “Managing the Nation’s Health: An Historical Analysis of U.S. Public Health Service Leadership during the 1960s and 1990s”
2001–No award
2000–Aaron Keselheim (University of Pennsylvania)
1999–Alisa Ann McQueen (Mt. Sinai School of Medicine), “Black bodies and the white plague: medical discourses of race and tuberculosis at the turn of the century in America”
Honorable mention: David Gerber (Cornell University Medical College), “Pure and wholesome: Stephen Allen, cholera, and the New York City water supply in the nineteenth century”
1998–Wen T. Shen (University of California, San Francisco)
Honorable mention: Thomas Morgan (Boston University), “An economic history of physician supply in New England, 1620-1990”
1997–Katherine Appleton Downes (Case Western Reserve School of Medicine), Getting along smoothly: becoming a physician in a man’s world–the medical education of Martha Beatrice Webb (1903-1990)
1996–Nancy Shao-Chia Chen (Washington University)
Honorable mention: Anjali Saini (University of Connecticut School of Medicine), “The pathology of sitala: cultural responses to smallpox in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century India”
Edward A.M. Duckworth (University of South Florida School of Medicine), “Striking a nerve: Descartes, Hobbes, LaMettrie, and the machinery of mind”
1995–Gabriella G. Gosman (Yale University)
Honorable mention: John T. Paige, “Evolution of a role for the dental surgeon in maxillofacial trauma during the Great War”
Katrina Marie Posta, “The balancing act: an analysis of dual career conflicts experienced by the first women physicians to graduate from Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania”
1994–Scott Harris Podolsky (Harvard University)
Honorable Mention: David Shumway Jones (Harvard Medical School), “The challenges of randomized surgical trials: evidence, faith, and the spread of coronary artery bypass grafting, (1967-1979)” [Thomas] Avery Gibbs (University of Oklahoma), “The effects of measles upon the health of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-62”
1993–Chris Feudtner (University of Pennsylvania)
Honorable mention: Walton O. Schalick, III (Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine), “Medicine fit for a king: doctors at the royal courts of France, 1031-1350”
1992–Kristine Cambell (Johns Hopkins University)
Honorable mention: Christopher Sellers (University of North Carolina School of Medicine), Crisis of legitimacy and the promise of research: workplace controversy and the emergence of modern clinical science at Harvard”
1991–Randolph N. Whitely (University of Kansas)
Honorable mention: David Branch Moody (Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine), “The healing power of the Marian miracle books of Bavarian shrines, (1489-1523)”
1990–Cary D. Alberstone (University of Albany)
Honorable mention: Christopher Crenner (Harvard University) Jason Rosenstock (Brown University)
1989–Joshua A. Beckman (New York University School of Medicine), “How antisepsis arrived in the second and third divisions of Bellevue Hospital: an examination of a national transformation in practice seen at the local level”
1988–Francis M. Lobo (Yale University Medical School), “John Haygarth, smallpox, and religious dissent in eighteenth-century England”
Honorable mention: Jose Ignacio Choca (University of Illinois at Chicago), “A mode of action: historical aspects of the receptor theory”
1987–David Leibowitz (New York University), “Scientific failure in an age of optimism: public reaction to Robert Koch’s tuberculin cure”
Honorable mention: David M. Bishai (University of California School of Medicine, San Diego), “The history of food fortification in America” Gene Nakajima (Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine), “Gertrude Stein’s medical education at Johns Hopkins”
1986–Alexander R. Miller (Mayo Medical School), “On the periphery: E.L. Scott and the discovery of insulin”
1985–Joan R. Butterton (Harvard University), “The education, naval service, and early career of Dr. William Smellie (1697-1763)”
1984–James R. Wright, Jr. (Ohio State Medical School), “The development of the frozen section technique, the evolution of surgical biopsy, and the origins of surgical pathology”
1983–No award
1982–Thomas Huddle (University of Illinois), “The origins of the reform of American medicine”
1981–Lewis P. Rubin (Yale University), ‘A Presumptious Provincial Genius’: the life and times of Thomas Beddoes (1760-1808)
1980–John Wright (Northwestern University), Ship fever in the steerage: medical aspects of the Irish migration
1979–Sandra E. Black (University of Toronto), “Pseudopods and synapses: the amoebid theories of neuronal mobility and the early formulation of the synapse concept, (1884-1900)”
1978–James Tait Goodrich (Columbia University School of Medicine), “Sixteenth-century anatomy and Andreas Vesalius: the contribution of Renaissance art to modern anatomical studies”
1977–James Allen Young (Duke University School of Medicine), “Anthropometric study of human growth in nineteenth-century American medicine”
Honorable Mention: Lawrence G. Miller (Harvard University), “Pain, Parturition and the Profession: Twilight Sleep in America”
1976–Steven A. Brody (Washington University School of Medicine), “The life and times of Sir Fielding Ould: Man-midwife and master physician”
Honorable mention: Arthur Gelston (Cornell Medical College), “Febre Typhus: its causes, diagnosis, and treatment during the epidemic of 1947, with a clinical analysis of 138 consecutive cases from the medical records of the New York Hospital”
For essay titles before 1975, see: Genevieve Miller, “The Missing Seal,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 50 (1976): 120-121.
1975–No award
1974–David Lovejoy, Jr. (University of Rochester)
1973–Kenneth M. Flegel (McGill University)
1972–Theron Keu-Hing Young (McGill University)
1971–Robert C. Powell (Duke University)
1970–Lawrence J. Hanna (University of Kansas)
1969–Lloyd Allan Wells (University of Rochester)
1968–Andrew Rosenblatt (Albert Einstein College of Medicine)
1967–Charles S. Bryan (Johns Hopkins University)
1966–Charles Nash Swisher (McGill University)
1965–No award
1964–Thomas W. Dow (University of Vermont)
1963–Peter D. Gibbons (Yale University)
1962–No award
1961–Eugene A. Cimino (University at Buffalo)
1960–David Franklin Musto (University of Washington)
1959–Richard L. Grant (University of Chicago)
1958–D. G. Lawrence (McGill University)
1957–Sebastian R. Italia (Yale University)
1956–Edward D. Coppola (Yale University)
1955–E. Edward Bittar (Yale University)
1954–Robert J. T. Joy (Yale University)
1953–Thomas Edward Moore, Jr. (Harvard University)
1952–Herbert S. Klickstein (University of Pennsylvania)
1951–Joseph A. Vasselli (University of Rochester)
1950–Thomas Franklin Williams (Harvard University)
1949–Charles A. Van Arsdall, Jr. (Johns Hopkins University)
1948–No award
1947–Honor M. Kidd (McGill University)
1946–Peter Kellaway (McGill University)
1945–No Award
1944–Willard L. Marmelzat (Tulane University)
1943–George Edward Murphy (University of Pennsylvania)
1942–John T. Barrett (Boston University)
1941–No award