International Network for the History of Hospitals

Barry Doyle

I am an historian of health who focuses on the development of hospitals, especially their finance, management and control, with my original research addressing cities in northern England, including a book, The Politics of Hospital Provision in Early Twentieth Century Britain. I am very interested in comparative history, completing projects on hospitals in England and France and in Central Europe between the wars. This led to an EU funded COST Action grant, National, International and Transnational Histories of Healthcare, 1850-2000 (EuroHealthHist), of which I am the Chair. My current interest is in the development of healthcare in colonial and post-colonial British and French West Africa in the twentieth century. In addition to the COST project and research on West Africa, I work on First Aid in Britain and France in the Twentieth Century with Dr Rosemary Cresswell, of Oxford University.

John Henderson

John Henderson is a social and medical historian of renaissance and early modern Italy. His books include Florence Under Siege: Surviving Plague in an Early Modern City (2019); Plague and the City, edited with Lukas Engelmann and Christos Lynteris (2019); and Representing Infirmity: Diseased Bodies in Renaissance Italy, edited with Fredrika Jacobs and Jonathan K. Nelson (2021). He is also the author of Piety and Charity in Late Medieval Florence (1994); The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe, with Jon Arrizabalaga and Roger French (1997); and The Renaissance Hospital: Healing the Body and Healing the Soul (2006). Most recently he has published The French Disease in Renaissance Italy. Representation and Experience (2024); and Medical Theory and Practice in Early Modern Italy, co-edited with Sandra Cavallo (2025).

Anna Peterson

Anna M. Peterson is an independent researcher whose work 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 the social and cultural perceptions of leprosy and its sufferers in the Middle Ages. She is currently a working member for the project Mujeres y Culturas de la Belleza: de Trota de Salerno a Marie Meurdrac/Women's Beauty Cultures: from Trota of Salerno to Marie Meurdrac (WOMENSBEAUT) (PID2024-159676NB-I00), with Prof. Montserrat Cabré (Universidade de Cantabria). 

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),’ analyses 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. Recently, she has written a study of language and the ‘construction’ of the leper in municipal and legal texts in Leprosy and Identity in the Middle Ages (2021) and co-authored a chapter on healthscaping in Siena in Disease and the Environment in the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds (2022). She is currently the Vice-President of Medica: the Society for the Study of Healing in the Middle Ages, as well as a co-editor of the book series Medica: Studies in Pre-Modern Health and Healing (Routledge).