Professor Michael R McVaugh

My intermittent association with history of medicine at "the Wellcome" began in 1972, when I spent a summer working at what was then the Wellcome Institute and made the acquaintance of Charles Talbot and Noel Poynter, and I'm still drawing on the research that I was enabled to do in those few months. I have spent much time since then returning to work in its later manifestations, its Academic Unit and its subsequent UCL avatar, discussing my work with Edwin Clarke and Roy Porter and Vivian Nutton, and it has continuously provided an outstandingly supportive, nourishing environment. It has been a research home away from home, one to which I have always gravitated naturally.

Plenty of other transAtlantic scholars, I'm sure, can claim an equally long and close association with the Wellcome, and I mention mine simply to make clear what a wonderful tradition of study and research and teaching this entity has maintained for more than a generation, and to suggest to you all (a little wryly now) why I was always so admiring of the Wellcome Trust for its willingness to put Sir Henry's wishes into rich effect; the behavior of the Trust, I used to think, showed that even an enormous financial institution could recognize the importance of intensely humane scholarship. But I was wrong.

Michael R McVaugh
William Smith Wells Professor of History (emeritus)
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill