The Pfizer Award is awarded annually by the
History of Science Society
The History of Science Society (HSS), founded in 1924, is the primary professional society for the academic study of the history of science. The society has over 3,000 members worldwide. It publishes the quarterly journal ''Isis'' and the yearly ...
"in recognition of an outstanding book dealing with the
history of science
The history of science covers the development of science from ancient history, ancient times to the present. It encompasses all three major branches of science: natural science, natural, social science, social, and formal science, formal. Pr ...
" that was "published in English during a period of three calendar years immediately preceding the year of competition."
Recipients
* 1959
Marie Boas Hall, ''Robert Boyle and Seventeenth-Century Chemistry'' (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1958).
* 1960
Marshall Clagett, ''The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages'' (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press
The University of Wisconsin Press (sometimes abbreviated as UW Press) is a Non-profit organization, non-profit university press publishing Peer review, peer-reviewed books and journals. It publishes work by scholars from the global academic comm ...
, 1959).
* 1961
Cyril Stanley Smith, ''A History of Metallography: The Development of Ideas on the Structure of Metal before 1890'' (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).
* 1962
Henry Guerlac
Henry Edward Guerlac (June 14, 1910 – May 29, 1985) was an American historian of science. He was a professor at Cornell University, where he was the Goldwin Smith Professor of History and a member of the Department of History.
Biography
Guerla ...
, ''Lavoisier, The Crucial Year: The Background and Origin of His First Experiments on Combustion in 1772'' (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press
The Cornell University Press is the university press of Cornell University, an Ivy League university in Ithaca, New York. It is currently housed in Sage House, the former residence of Henry William Sage. It was first established in 1869, maki ...
, 1961)
* 1963
Lynn Townsend White Jr., ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962).
* 1964 , ''The Lunar Society of Birmingham: A Social History of Provincial Science and Industry in Eighteenth-Century England'' (London: Oxford University Press, 1963).
* 1965
Charles Donald O'Malley, ''Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 1514-1564'' (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964).
* 1966
L. Pearce Williams, ''Michael Faraday: A Biography'' (New York: Basic Books, 1965).
* 1967 , ''Marcello Malpighi and the Evolution of Embryology'' (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966).
* 1968
Edward Rosen, ''Kepler's Somnium'' (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967).
* 1969
Margaret T. May, ''Galen on the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body'' (Ithaca. N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1968).
* 1970
Michael Ghiselin
Michael T. Ghiselin (born May 13, 1939; died June 14, 2024) was an American biologist and philosopher as well as a historian of biology, formerly at the California Academy of Sciences.
He is known for his work concerning sea slugs, and for his c ...
, ''The Triumph of the Darwinian Method'' (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).
* 1971
David Joravsky, ''The Lysenko Affair'' (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1970).
* 1972
Richard S. Westfall
S. Westfall (April 22, 1924 – August 21, 1996) was an American biographer and historian of science. He is best known for his biography of Isaac Newton, ''Never at Rest'', and his work on the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. He ta ...
, ''Force in Newton's Physics: The Science of Dynamics in the Seventeenth Century'' (New York: American Elsevier, 1971).
* 1973
Joseph S. Fruton, ''Molecules and Life: Historical Essays on the Interplay ofChemistry and Biology'' (New York: John Wiley, 1972).
* 1974 , ''The Edge of an Unfamiliar World: A History of Oceanography'' (New York: Dutton, 1973).
* 1975
Frederic L. Holmes, ''Claude Bernard and Animal Chemistry: The Emergence of a Scientist'' (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974).
* 1976
Otto E. Neugebauer
Otto Eduard Neugebauer (May 26, 1899 – February 19, 1990) was an Austrian-American mathematician and historian of science who became known for his research on the history of astronomy and the other exact sciences as they were practiced in a ...
, ''A History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy'' (3 vols.) (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1975).
* 1977
Stephen G. Brush
Stephen George Brush (born February 12, 1935) is a historian of science whose career spanned the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. His research resulted in hundreds of journal articles and over a dozen books.
Life and career
Brush ...
, ''The Kind of Motion We Call Heat'' (Amsterdam/New York: North-Holland, 1976).
* 1978
Allen G. Debus, ''The Chemical Philosophy: Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries'' (New York: Science History Publications, 1977).
* 1978
Merritt Roe Smith
Merritt Roe Smith (born 1940) is an American historian. He is the Leverett and William Cutten Professor of the History of Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Life
Smith graduated from Georgetown University, and Pennsylvania ...
, Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change (Ithaca, N.Y./London: Cornell University Press, 1977).
* 1979
Susan Faye Cannon, ''Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period'' (New York: Science History Publications, 1978).
* 1980
Frank J. Sulloway, ''Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend'' (New York: Basic Books, 1979).
* 1981
Charles Coulston Gillispie
Charles Coulston Gillispie (; August 6, 1918 – October 6, 2015) was an American historian of science. He was the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History of Science at Princeton University, and was credited with building Princeton's history of scie ...
, ''Science and Polity in France at the End of the Old Regime'' (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980).
* 1982
Thomas Goldstein, ''Dawn of Modern Science: From the Arabs to Leonardo da Vinci'' (New York: Hougbton Mifllin, 1980).
* 1983
Richard S. Westfall
S. Westfall (April 22, 1924 – August 21, 1996) was an American biographer and historian of science. He is best known for his biography of Isaac Newton, ''Never at Rest'', and his work on the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. He ta ...
, ''Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
* 1984
Kenneth R. Manning, ''
Black Apollo of Science: The Life of Ernest Everett Just'' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).
* 1985
Noel Swerdlow and
Otto Neugebauer
Otto Eduard Neugebauer (May 26, 1899 – February 19, 1990) was an Austrian-American mathematician and historian of science who became known for his research on the history of astronomy and the other exact sciences as they were practiced in an ...
, ''Mathematical Astronomy in Copernicus's De Revolutionibus'' (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1984).
* 1986
I. Bernard Cohen, ''Revolution in Science'' (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985).
* 1987
Christa Jungnickel and
Russell McCormmach
Russell Keith McCormmach (born 9 October 1933) is an American historian of physics.
McCormmach grew up in Walla Walla, Washington and studied physics at Washington State University, Washington State College with bachelor's degree in 1955. As a Rho ...
, ''
Intellectual Mastery of Nature: Theoretical Physics from Ohm to Einstein'' (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
* 1988
Robert J. Richards, ''Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior'' (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
* 1989
Lorraine Daston
Lorraine Jenifer Daston (born June 9, 1951) is an American historian of science. She is director emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin, visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the U ...
, ''Classical Probability in the Enlightenment'' (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1988).
* 1990 and
M. Norton Wise, ''Energy and Empire: A Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
* 1991
Adrian Desmond
Adrian John Desmond (born 1947) is an English writer on the history of science and author of books about Charles Darwin.
Life
He studied physiology at London University and went on to study the history of science and vertebrate palaeontology at ...
, ''The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London'' (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
* 1991
Servos, John W.''Physical chemistry from Ostwald to Pauling : the making of a science in America'' Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1990.
* 1992
James R. Bartholomew, ''The Formation of Science in Japan: Building a Research Tradition'' (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
* 1993
David C. Cassidy, ''
Uncertainty: The Life and Science of Werner Heisenberg'' (New York: Freeman, 1992).
* 1994
Joan Cadden, ''The Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
* 1995
Pamela H. Smith, ''The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire'' (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
* 1996
Paula Findlen, ''Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy'' (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
* 1997
Margaret W. Rossiter, ''Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action, 1940-1972'' (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
* 1998
Peter Galison
Peter Louis Galison (born May 17, 1955) is an American historian and philosopher of science. He is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor in history of science and technology, history of science and physics at Harvard University.
Biography
G ...
, ''Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics'' (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
* 1999
Lorraine Daston
Lorraine Jenifer Daston (born June 9, 1951) is an American historian of science. She is director emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin, visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the U ...
and
Katharine Park, ''Wonders and the Order of Nature'', 1150-1750 (Zone Books, 1998).
* 2000 , ''The Science of Energy: A Cultural History of Energy Physics'' (University of Chicago Press, 1998).
* 2001
John L. Heilbron, ''The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories'' (Harvard University Press, 1999).
* 2002
James A. Secord, ''Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of ''Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (University of Chicago Press, 2000).
* 2003
Mary Terrall, ''The Man Who Flattened the Earth: Maupertuis and the Sciences in the Enlightenment'' (University of Chicago Press, 2002).
* 2004
Janet Browne, ''Charles Darwin: The Power of Place'' (Princeton University Press, 2003)
* 2005
William Newman and
Lawrence Principe, ''Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry''
* 2006 , ''Patterns of Behavior: Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and the Founding of Ethology''
* 2007
David Kaiser, ''Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics'' (University of Chicago, 2005)
* 2008
Deborah Harkness, ''The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution'' (Yale University Press, 2007)
* 2009
Harold J. Cook, ''Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age'' (Yale University Press, 2007)
* 2010
Maria Rosa Antognazza, ''Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography'' (Cambridge University Press, 2009)
* 2011
Eleanor Robson, ''Mathematics in Ancient Iraq: A Social History'' (Princeton University Press, 2008)
* 2012
Dagmar Schaefer, ''The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China'' (University of Chicago Press, 2011)
* 2013 , ''The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon'' (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
* 2014 , ''Picturing the book of nature: Image, text and argument in sixteenth-century human anatomy and medical botany'' (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
* 2015 , ''Ivan Pavlov: A Russian Life in Science'' (Oxford University Press, 2014)
* 2016 , ''Observing by Hand. Sketching the Nebulae in the Nineteenth Century'' (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
* 2017 , '' Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism'' (MIT Press, 2016)
* 2018 , ''The Courtiers’ Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV’s Paris'' (University of Chicago Press, 2015)
* 2019 , ''Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale'' (University of Chicago Press, 2018)
* 2020
Theodore M. Porter, ''Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity'' (Princeton University Press, 2018)
* 2021
María Portuondo, ''The Spanish Disquiet: The Biblical Natural Philosophy of Benito Arias Montano''.
* 2022
Tara Nummedal, ''Anna Zieglerin and the Lion’s Blood: Alchemy and End Times in Reformation Germany''
* 2023
Robyn d'Avignon, ''Ritual Geology. Gold and Subterranean Knowledge in Savanna West Africa''
* 2024
Projit Mukharji, ''Brown Skins, White Coats: Race Science in India, 1920–66''
References
{{reflist
Science and technology awards
Awards established in 1959
History of science awards