Norah Schuster prize and Bynum lecture

This annual meeting aims to promote the history of medicine to undergraduate students by encouraging new areas of research utilising a range of resources.

The first part of the session will be dedicated to the prestigious Norah Schuster Prize. Participants will be able to support their development as medical historians plus acknowledge their contributions, with the two prize winners having the opportunity to present their research. Find out more about how to apply for the prize here. 

The second part of the event will feature the Bynum lecture, led by Professor Anna Marie Roos Professor of the History of Science and Medicine, University of Lincoln Editor-in-Chief, Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science. This year's theme will explore the interdisciplinarity of physicians in the early Royal Society.

'Interdisciplinarity' is a buzzword utilised by contemporary researchers, universities, and funding agencies. But its practice is nothing new, and some of the most interdisciplinary scholars were physicians working in the seventeenth-century Royal Society, demonstrating close ties between medicine and natural history. Martin Lister (1639-1712), Royal Physician and the first scientific arachnologist and conchologist, and Nehemiah Grew (1641-1712) practicing doctor, museum keeper for the Royal Society, and extraordinary microscopist and botanist, moved seamlessly between these pursuits. They observed their patients and the natural world with sensitivity, keen empiricism, and in Lister's case, artistic flair. Expertise in natural history in the seventeenth century was representative of it becoming foundational for a great deal of contemporary science, including medicine. But these physicians' integration of natural history and medicine went even further than virtuosic interdisciplinarity. As Hal Cook has remarked, natural history was the early modern equivalent of "big science", and these physicians were at its very centre.

By attending, you will:

• Learn about the range of papers submitted for the Norah Schuster prize written by medical students
• Be able to recognise how initial interest in medical history may be developed by reference to the standard of the Bynum award

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