Annual award by the American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM)
The William H. Welch Medal is an annual award given by the American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM) to the author or co-authors of an outstanding book in medical history. According to the current rules, the award is not for editorial work. The book must be published during the five years preceding the award, which is presented at the AAHM's annual meeting. Any author who is awarded the William H. Welch is ineligible for subsequent awards of the medal — this rule of ineligibility was instituted in 1973, after Erwin Ackerknecht received the medal in 1953 and in 1972. The medal is named in honor of William H. Welch, M.D., a pathologist, bacteriologist, and first dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.[1][2] The inaugural medal was awarded in 1950 to Henry E. Sigerist.[1] He grew up in Paris and Zurich and in 1932 moved to the United States as the successor to William H. Welch as director of the Johns Hopkins University Institute of the History of Medicine.[3]
Past recipients
The medal has been awarded every year since 1971. Before 1971, there were some years in which the medal was not awarded.[4][5]
2023 — Yan Liu, Healing with Poisons: Potent Medicines in Medieval China (University of Washington Press, 2021) ISBN0295748990
2022 — Jaipreet Virdi, Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History (University of Chicago Press, 2020) ISBN0226824063
2020 — Nicole Barnes, Intimate Communities: Wartime Healthcare and the Birth of Modern China, 1937–1945 (University of California Press, 2018) ASINB07JMTSRNWISBN0520300467
2019 — Pablo Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (University of North Carolina Press, 2017); 2017 pbk edition. ISBN9781469630878.
2018 — Cristian Berco, From Body to Community: Venereal Disease and Society in Baroque Spain (University of Toronto Press, 2016) ISBN9781442649620
2017 — Johanna Schoen, Abortion After Roe: Abortion After Legalization (University of North Carolina Press, 2015) ISBN1469621185
2016 — Sean Hsiang-Lin Lei, Neither Donkey Nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle Over China’s Modernity (University of Chicago Press, 2014) ISBN022616988X
2015 — Leslie J. Reagan, Dangerous Pregnancies: Mothers, Disabilities, and Abortion in Modern America (University of California Press, 2010) ISBN9780520259034
2014 — Julie Livingston, Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic (Duke, University Press, 2012) ISBN9780822395768
2012 — Gregg Mitman, Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes (Yale University Press, 2007) ISBN9780300110357
2011 — Allan M. Brandt, The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America (Basic Books, 2007) ISBN0465070477
2010 — Warwick Anderson, The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen (The Johns Hopkins University Press: 2008) ISBN0801890403
2009 — Katharine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (Zone Books, 2006) ISBN1890951684
2008 — Frank M. Snowden, The Conquest of Malaria: Italy, 1900-1962 (New Haven: Yale University Press 2006) ISBN0300108990
2007 — Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meaning of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) ISBN0520283821
2006 — Barron H. Lerner, Breast Cancer Wars: Hope, Fear, and the Pursuit of a Cure in Twentieth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) ISBN0195142616
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) ISBN0807825840
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) LCCN98-55496
2003 — Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (London: HarperCollins, 1997); 1999 pbk edition. ISBN0-393-31980-6.
2002 — Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). ISBN0674357086
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); 2002 pbk edition. ISBN0521524598.
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)
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) LCCN85-30235OCLC13063089
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 (1919–2007), American Medicine and Statistical Thinking, 1800–1860 (Harvard University Press, 1984) ISBN0674732200; and Medicine and American Growth, 1800–1860 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1986) ISBN0299109003
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 Gregg Frank, Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists: Scientific Ideas and Social Interaction (University of California Press, 1980) LCCN79-63553ISBN0520039068
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 Ballard Blake (1922–2006), "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 — Frederic L. Holmes, Claude Bernard and Animal Chemistry: The Emergence of a Scientist (Harvard University Press, 1974) ISBN0674134850
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) ISBN0854840117; and Mind and Body in Eighteenth-Century Medicine (University of California Press, 1965), 2023 Kindle Edition. ISBN978-0520358980.; and for “his important continuing studies in the history of medicine”
1958 — Charles F. Mullett (1901–1994), The Bubonic Plague and England: An Essay in the History of Preventive Medicine (University of Kentucky Press, 1956) LCCN56-6994
^Miller, Genevieve (1976). "The missing seal, or highlights of the first half century of the American Association for the History of Medicine". Bulletin of the History of Medicine. 50 (1): 93–121. JSTOR44450316. PMID769878.