Founding Members:

Professor Carole Rawcliffe

CAROLE RAWCLIFFE is Professor Emeritus of Medieval History at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. She has published widely in the fields of medieval health, hospitals and medical practice. Her books include Medicine for the Soul: The Life, Death and Resurrection of an English Medieval Hospital (Stroud, 1999), Leprosy in Medieval England (Woodbridge, 2006) and Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Later Medieval English Towns and Cities (Woodbridge, 2013), each being the outcome of projects funded by the Wellcome Trust. She has also co-edited a two-volume History of Norwich (London, 2004), a special number of The Fifteenth Century on Society in an Age of Plague (Woodbridge, 2013) and a collection of essays on Policing the Urban Environment in Premodern Europe (Amsterdam, 2019).

Professor John Henderson

JOHN HENDERSON is an Emeritus Professor of Italian Renaissance, Birkbeck, University of London, and a Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Cambridge. He is a social and medical historian of renaissance and early modern Tuscany, and in particular of Florence.

His books include Piety and Charity in Late Medieval Florence (Oxford UP, 1994); Pieta’ e carita’ nella Firenze del Basso Medioevo (Casa Editrice Le Lettere, Florence, 1998); The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe, with Jon Arrizabalaga and Roger French (Yale University Press,1997); The Renaissance Hospital: Healing the Body and Healing the Soul (Yale University Press, 2006); L’Ospedale rinascimentale. La cura del corpo e dell’anima (Bologna: Odoya, 2016). He also co-edited and wrote the Introduction with Peregrine Horden and Alessandro Pastore to The Impact of Hospitals in Europe 300–2000: People, Landscapes, Symbols (Peter Lang, 2006).

His most recent books: Florence Under Siege: Surviving Plague in an Early Modern City (Yale University Press, 2019); La peste di Firenze. Come la citta’ sopravvisse alla terribile epidemia del 1630-1631 (Rome: Newton Compton, 2021); Plague and the City, edited with Lukas Engelmann and Christos Lynteris (Routledge, 2019); and Representing Infirmity. Diseased Bodies in Renaissance Italy, edited with Fredrika Jacobs and Jonathan Nelson (Routledge, 2021).

He is co-editor with Jonathan Nelson of the Cambridge University book series Renaissance Elements and with Peter Howard of the Routledge series The Body and the City.

Other Board Members:

Professor Barry Doyle

BARRY DOYLE is a Professor of Health History at the University of Huddersfield, UK. His research is concentrated in three areas: the history of hospitals before the NHS; early twentieth-century urban history, especially urban politics; and the development of European health systems before welfare states. His current research, funded by the Wellcome Trust, has examined the politics and finance of hospital provision in Yorkshire prior to the NHS. In addition to articles in Medical History and Social History of Medicine, his book The Politics of Hospital Provision in Early Twentieth Century Britain will be published by Chatto and Pickering in March 2014 as part of their Social History of Medicine Series.

Professor Fritz Dross

FRITZ DROSS is an assistant professor for the History of Medicine at the Institute for the History of Medicine and Medical Ethics, Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg in Erlangen, Germany. His first book on the history of hospitals was Krankenhaus und lokale Politik. Das Beispiel Düsseldorf 1770-1850 (2004). Research topics include the history of hospitals and urban health services in Early Modern Germany. He recently published the history of German gynecologic societies in the 20th century. Since 2014 he has been president of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Krankenhausgeschichte (German Association for the History of Hospitals) and co-editor of Historia Hospitalium.

Dr Jane Stevens Crawshaw

JANE STEVENS CRAWSHAW is a Senior Lecturer in Early Modern European History at Oxford Brookes University. Her research interests bridge the social, medical and environmental history of early modern Italy. Her most recent study is a comparison of environmental management in Renaissance Genoa and Venice and will be published by Oxford University Press in July 2023 as Cleaning Up Renaissance Italy: Environmental Ideals and Urban Practices in Genoa and Venice. Her first book, a holistic study of quarantine institutions, was Plague Hospitals: Public Health for the City in Early Modern Venice (2012).

Dr Kathleen Vongsathorn

KATHLEEN VONGSATHORN is an Associate Professor of History at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Her research interests include a broad spectrum of historical categories, including medical history, African history, the history of childhood, humanitarian history, mission history, and the history of emotions. Her research focuses on leprosy and medical humanitarianism in twentieth-century Uganda; the role of women in influencing changing health-seeking choices in Uganda, 1897-1979, with a particular focus on maternal health; and the integration of history into STEM education.

Dr Elma Brenner

ELMA BRENNER is a Specialist in Medieval and Early Modern Medicine at the Wellcome Library, London. She joined the Library from the History and Philosophy of Science department at the University of Cambridge, and the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies at the University of Toronto, where her research interests included the history of leprosy, mental illness, hospitals and charity in medieval Western Europe, focusing on the city of Rouen, France. The post of Specialist in Medieval and Early Modern Medicine was created to increase the profile of the Wellcome Library’s important collections from these periods, and to stimulate and facilitate their use by a range of audiences, both physically and online.

Dr Anna M PEterson

ANNA M. PETERSON is an independent researcher and adjunct at the Centro de Idiomas at the Universidad Europea Miguel de Cervantes (Valladolid, Spain). In 2017, she was awarded her PhD in medieval history from the University of St Andrews. Her thesis, ‘A Comparative Study of the Hospitals and Leprosaria in Narbonne, France and Siena, Italy (1080-1348),’ analysed the development of assistive institutions in these cities, focusing on their relationship with religious and secular bodies as well as responses to corruption. She was awarded a Mellon Fellowship at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (Toronto) from 2018-2019. She is also the co-founder of ‘Leprosy and the ‘Leper’ Reconsidered.’

Dr. Peterson’s research focuses on corruption and accountability in hospitals and leprosaria, especially in southwestern Europe, and the healthscaping policies of religious and secular authorities. Additionally, she also studies on the social and cultural perceptions of leprosy and its sufferers in the Middle Ages. She is currently a working member for the project ‘Hermenéutica del Cuerpo Visible: Conceptualizaciones y Prácticas en la Medicina Medieval de Tradición Latina/Hermeneutics of the Visible Body: Conceptualisations and Practices in Medieval Medicine in the Latin Tradition’(VisibleBodyMed) (PID2019-107671GB-I00), with Prof. Montserrat Cabré (Universidade de Cantabria).