Dr Elizabeth Hallam has been awarded the Wellcome Medal for Anthropology as Applied to Medical Problems for her book Anatomy Museum: Death and the Body Displayed (Reaktion, 2016). The Medal, together with a prize of £600, is awarded biennially by the Council of the Royal Anthropological Institute for a body of published work which makes, as a whole, a significant contribution to research in anthropology as applied to medical problems. The medal and prize are the gift of the Wellcome Trust.
Elizabeth graduated in 1989 with a First Class Honours Degree in Anthropology from Kent, where she also undertook her PhD (1993) on Crisis and Representation: Gender and social relations in Canterbury and its region, c. 1580-1640. She has since held positions at Kent, Aberdeen and Oxford, and is currently Editor of the Institute’s Journal. Her current research brings together her anthropological work on the body, death, material and visual culture, to focus on museums of anatomy in medical schools in Scotland and England. This research is concerned with the collection, preservation and display of human bodies from the nineteenth century to the present. How and why bodies have been rendered in the flesh, in wax, paper and plastic, and through drawing, photography and film, in the pursuit of anatomical knowledge, are issues explored in her monograph, Anatomy Museum: Death and the Body Displayed, illustrated with specially commissioned photographs.
Further information on the award, and past recipients, can be found here.