Medical History: William Bynum Essay Prize

The Centre for Global Health Histories houses the editorial office of the Cambridge University Press journal Medical History. Each year the journal runs an international essay competition, the William Bynum Prize, for doctoral students and early post-doctoral researchers on the theme of the history of medicine. This is an opportunity to celebrate exciting new work in the field.

We are delighted to announce that the 2016 prize has been awarded to David Freis (University of Münster) for his entry ‘Diagnosing the Kaiser: Psychiatry, Wilhelm II and the question of German war guilt’. The runner up was Angela Muir (a Wellcome Trust and SSHRC funded PhD candidate at the University of Exeter) with her entry ‘”She never saw such a breast of any honest girl”: Reading and regulating single women’s reproductive bodies in eighteenth-century Wales’.

The Prize Committee was chaired by William Bynum and comprised Akihito Suzuki, Joanna Radin, Nick Hopwood and Susan Heydon. The winning essay will be published in Medical History (subject to the usual reviewing processes), with the winner receiving a £250 cash award as well as £250 in Cambridge University Press vouchers.

The competition will run again next year, and entries are invited on any theme relating to the history of medicine and its related sciences. All submissions should be sent to the journal editor, Professor Sanjoy Bhattacharya, by 1 January 2018. This international competition is open to doctoral students and early post-doctoral researchers (candidates who completed their PhDs less than 3 years before submission of the entry). Details of the winning essay and its author will be announced in mid-2018. All enquiries regarding the competition should be directed to the editor of Medical History, Professor Bhattacharya, sanjoy.bhattacharya@york.ac.uk.

The prize is generously supported by Cambridge University Press and co-ordinated by Medical History's editorial office housed at the University of York.