Department of History

Hal Cook comes from the American Midwest, although he is now a British as well as US citizen, having devoted almost a decade to his work as Professor of the History of Medicine and Director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL. He previously taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Harvard University, and has served the communities of the history of medicine and science, as well as history in general, through various professional society committees and editorial work. He takes an interest in global history, science and capitalism, and the history of medicine, especially in the early modern period, with the aim of exploring how some forms of knowledge-making are transcultural; his research has been mostly on the 17th century, in recent years focusing on the relationships between commerce, medicine, and science in the Dutch Global Age. A book on The Young Descartes: Nobility, Rumor, and War,  has recently appeared with the University of Chicago Press, and an edited collection, Translation at Work: Chinese Medicine in the First Global Age, with Brill. He has held several fellowships and has been the recipient of a number of honors and awards, including two book prizes: the Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine (1997) and the Pfizer Prize of the History of Science Society (2009).