As I headed towards retirement last September, it was a time of reflection on my almost three decades based in Warwick’s History Department. Coinciding with the 25^th Birthday of the Centre for the History of Medicine (CHM), my thoughts turned particularly to the setting up and running of the Centre, a key part of my career after I arrived at Warwick in 1996. During this long-term relationship I have seen nine heads of department come and go, the university and department change and grow substantially and the CHM flourish. The CHM has offered me a community, amazing colleagues, students and collaborations over the years, and opportunities I could never have anticipated when I moved to Warwick.

When celebrating the CHM’s birthday back in September, my brief was to talk about the CHM’s beginnings, the first decade or so. Not least because very few of us at the celebrations remembered Warwick in 1996! So how did the CHM come about and what defined its early years?

In 1996 I arrived at Warwick from the Netherlands to take up a Wellcome Trust University Award. It was an extremely exciting move for me, not least as I was leaving a medical school post to join what was then the Centre for the Study of Social History. I was met at Warwick by Colin Jones who had recently moved from Exeter to take up a Professorship in History at Warwick and Joan Lane, a long-standing member of the department and a well-regarded social historian of medicine. We were confident that the three of us working in the history of medicine could establish a viable centre and embarked on what I remember to be an exciting and fun enterprise.

One of the motivations of the Wellcome Trust in setting up the University Award scheme, alongside developing new research projects, was to build the history of medicine in universities across the country. This was a smart move by the Wellcome, dreamt up by their wonderful grant administrator David Allen. It was also high risk given that most of us were relatively early career appointments. It put the Wellcome Award Holders, around fifteen of us in total across the UK, in healthy competition with each other, and offered opportunities for us to grow and the discipline to grow too. Up until then the history of medicine had been heavily concentrated in the Golden Triangle, London, Oxford and Cambridge, with further Wellcome Units in Manchester and Glasgow.

I should mention at this juncture, the role of Carolyn Steedman, who was critical in getting the Wellcome University Award approved at Warwick. She knew – because I tipped her off! – that David Allen enjoyed his food, so she wined and dined him lavishly on his visit to Warwick and invited everyone she could think of across the university who might have an interest in the history of medicine to meet him over lunch. When Colin and I arrived here, we had a long list of colleagues across all three faculties to meet with. Providing us with this network was significant and collaborating with colleagues across the university quickly became an important, enriching and enjoyable tradition for the CHM. Initially, we worked mainly with colleagues in Sociology and Applied Social Studies and since then, staff, postdocs and postgraduates have collaborated with Theatre Studies, French, English, Philosophy, the Business School, Biological Sciences and the Warwick Medical School on a variety of projects, some research based, some public engagement. Interdisciplinarity became part of our mission and practice and enabled us not only to become a key player in the department’s research agenda but to connect with the university more widely.

The late 1990s was an exciting time to come to Warwick. We had a new Labour government, we were on the cusp of the first ever Research Assessment Exercise (less exciting?), our then exceptional Vice Chancellor Sir Brian Follett had launched the Warwick Research Fellowship Scheme, bringing around twenty early career scholars to the University, and was exploring the prospect of a medical school at Warwick. Many of us who worked at Warwick during those years remember a Vice Chancellor who knew many people by name, was visible in person on campus, and who would sit down with academics for lunch and ask questions such as ‘What do you think about having a medical school at Warwick?’ University administration still fitted into Senate House on central campus. We were allowed to have dinners off campus and the other thing I learned from Carolyn was the importance, as we rather grandly put it, of ‘eating out for the university’! Social eating and drinking subsequently became built into CHM practice. Overall, across the late 1990s, there was an overwhelmingly positive feeling of can-do. This was an important backdrop to the setting up of the CHM.

So, some time around 1998 we set about establishing the CHM, writing a constitution, organising a seminar series, developing a Masters degree programme, and teaching undergraduate modules. In 1999 I became the first Director of the CHM. Of the grants won in the early years, the first one was perhaps most exciting – in 2001 we were awarded a Group Award of £30K from the Wellcome Trust to build capacity. This felt like a fortune at that point and meant that we could arrange some administrative support and bring in catering. Before that, I hazily recollect buttering bread for sandwiches for the first workshop I organised (on the history of midwifery) and running around the campus in the evenings with Colin sticking up fliers advertising our seminar series.

Louise Morgan has kindly circulated some of the CHM’s earliest annual reports and this led me down many rabbit holes and reminded me of how quickly we all got cracking. Mathew Thomson had joined the History Department in 1998 and Claudia Stein in 2002, and together we ensured that the £30K went a long way. Over those two years we organised five one-day symposia, two run by our PhDs, funded further workshops led by Tim Lockley and Sarah Richardson, and hosted a two-day workshop with Dutch and German colleagues. We co-organised a fortnightly seminar series with Sociology on ‘Narratives of Illness’, the MAs and PhDs established a reading lunch. The Wellcome recognised our heft and ambition and in 2003 we won our first Strategic Award (almost £600K) and between 2001-3 the CHM collectively won its first £1 million in grants. We were also awarded MA funding during this period and ten MAs completed, and by 2003 we had recruited a total of nine PhDs and our first three had successfully passed their vivas. I feel exhausted now looking at this list – and wonder how we pulled together to do all of this. Could it be I ask myself that we had fewer administrative and monitoring tasks during those years?

The 2003 Strategic Award gave us the boost to greatly expand our activities and to carve out an identity for ourselves, under a programme of work on the ‘Cultures and Practices of Health’, involving all Centre members. We appointed our first full-time administrator, Molly Rogers, and moved to the fourth floor of what is now the old humanities building. This was followed by a rather unseemly room grab and unpleasant scenes with colleagues in the Renaissance Centre as rooms were reallocated. Molly was installed in an office previously used as a broom cupboard (she loved it once she got used to it as did Sheilagh Holmes who held out for many months against being moved to a shared office years later).

Claudia Stein won a second University Award in 2002, Sarah Hodges joined the History Department in 2003, Catherine Cox in 2004 and Roberta Bivins in 2008, the year when we were awarded a second Strategic Award for a new collaborative project: ‘Situating Medicine: New Directions in the History of Medicine’. As we became one of largest clusters of historians of medicine in the UK, we were joined by David Hardiman, David Arnold and Angela Davis, who went on to win a third University Award in 2012. We also bid successfully for three Wellcome project grants, including one working with Vicky Long on health in work, collaborating with another of our close partners, the Modern Records Centre, and a project on migration and mental illness with my long-term collaborator who had by then moved to University College Dublin, Catherine Cox.

During these years we also kickstarted what has become a very distinctive feature of the CHM, challenging, diverse and innovative public engagement work, organising events on ‘Water and the Body’ with the Leamington Spa Pumps rooms in 2005, ‘Live Performance and the History of Medicine’ with theatre studies (featuring a voyage through a man’s gastro-intestinal tract! and followed by a Leverhulme Artist in Residence in 2008-9) and the magnificent Coventry & Warwickshire Hospital Project led by Mathew in 2006, featuring an exhibition and site-specific theatre performance in the decommissioned hospital. In the same year we hosted the Society for the Social History of Medicine’s Annual Conference at Warwick, in collaboration with the Birmingham Centre for the History of Medicine.

In 2009 I was seconded to Warwick’s Institute of Advanced Study and in the years that followed the CHM was directed by Mathew, Angela, Claudia and Roberta, with huge success (hopefully Roberta will do a follow up piece to this on her experiences as director?). More recently, we grumbled when the Wellcome abandoned Strategic Awards, because they were a marvellous way of involving everyone in the CHM, but quickly adapted to Investigator Awards, focusing on more specific research projects. We have been lucky enough to carry on winning major grants – including three investigator awards on the Cultural History of the NHS, Prisoners, Medical Care and Entitlement to Health and more recently the history of postnatal mental illness – to facilitate our research and engagement. Over the years – as we were joined by Howard Chiang, Elise Smith, Claire Shaw, Sophie Mann, Doreen Kembabazi and Anna Toropova – the CHM has become recognised in fields as diverse as health at work, medical practice in France, the history of the smile, medicine in South Asia, the history of psychiatry and psychology, curing with water, migration, health and disease, early modern medicine and science, bio-power, the history of AIDS, maternal and child health, the history of disability, diabetes, the medical history of Russia, and medicine in the British Empire. I think it’s fair to say we have made our mark. Along the way we have had amazing support staff who have not only chivvied and organised, but enthused and inspired, Ros Lucas, Molly Rogers, Tracy Horton, Sheilagh Holmes, Flo Swann and Keri Husband.

This brings me to a final of the CHM’s distinctive features – our sense of community, and emphasis on inclusivity, supporting and working not only with each other and colleagues across the university and beyond it, but importantly with generations of PhD students and postdoctoral researchers, involving them in our research, events and public engagement work, most generously supported by the Wellcome Trust. Over the years, the work produced during these research collaborations and the friendships I have made, have been incredibly important to me. I’ve been very fortunate to work with a dozen brilliant postdocs and over twenty PhDs since 1996, as part of a much larger community of early careers scholars in the CHM. We’ve been recognised for our training of early career scholars but of course they also train us in new subjects, ideas and methodological approaches. Many of them have gone on to impressive academic careers and work in the public sector, policy, research support and teaching and we are very proud of them and the CHM’s legacy.