Medical historian lauded by Yale’s graduate school for mentorship

John Harley Warner, Ph.D., chair and Avalon Professor of the History of Medicine and an expert on the cultural and social history of medicine in the United States during the 19th and 20th centuries, is a recipient of a 2010 Graduate Mentor Award in the humanities from Yale University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

The award, the university’s top honor for teaching, advising, and mentoring, recognizes teachers and advisors for exceptional support of the professional, scholarly, and personal development of their students. Warner will be honored in February during the university’s Mentoring Week and at the Graduate School Convocation in May.

After receiving his doctorate in the history of science from Harvard University in 1984, Warner was a postdoctoral fellow at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London. He joined the medical school faculty as assistant professor of the history of medicine in 1986 and became chair of the section in 2002.

Under Warner’s leadership of the Program in the History of Science and Medicine, Yale College’s undergraduate major in the History of Science/History of Medicine (one of Yale’s 10 largest majors) attracts about 40 new students per year.

Warner is the author of numerous scholarly articles and three books. In 2009, Warner and James S. Edmonson, Ph.D., chief curator of Case Western Reserve University’s Dittrick Medical History Center, published Dissection: Photographs of a Rite in Passage in American Medicine, 1880–1930, to wide critical acclaim.

Also receiving Graduate Mentor Awards were Suzanne H. Alonzo, Ph.D., assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, for the sciences, and Kelly D. Brownell, Ph.D., professor of psychology and epidemiology, for social sciences.