Winner of the 2022 Whitfield Book Prize

I am delighted to share that my book Imperial Bodies in London: Empire, Mobility and the Making of British Medicine 1880-1914 has been awarded the 2022 Whitfield Book Prize from the Royal Historical Society. I am incredibly grateful to the prize panel and to the RHS for selecting my book for this prestigious prize - I hope that it demonstrates not only the importance of the history of medicine to the study of history more widely, but also shows how empire is really at the heart of British history. I hope that my embodied approach to thinking about the archives of empire might inspire others to think about everyday health as a way of unravelling the dense connections between Britain and its empire.

Many thanks to all of the people who have supported me along the way - especially the team at University of Pittsburgh Press. I have so many thanks in fact that I made a short video, which you can find below.

Judges Citation:

“Imperial Bodies in London brings together postcolonial scholarship with the history of medicine to impressive effect. It gives a vivid account of London as an imperial city, in which colonial encounters were present within the very bodies of its residents.

Kristin Hussey focuses on specific organs of the body to show how anxieties over travel, climate, parasites, and infections shaped metropolitan medical practice. As well as a superb intellectual achievement, the book is also written with creativity and imagination, bringing to life the physicality of its sources, and conveying the entanglement of imperial human bodies with an array of non-human entities and forces.”

Whitfield Prize panel, 2022