The Pfizer Award
The Pfizer Award is awarded in recognition of an outstanding book dealing with the history of science. Click History of Science Society for more information about the sponsor of these awards.
2022 Anna Zieglerin and the lion's blood : alchemy and end times in Reformation Germany by Tara Nummedal
2021 The Spanish disquiet : the biblical natural philosophy of Benito Arias Montano by María M. Portuondo
2020 Genetics in the madhouse : the unknown history of human heredity by Theodore M. Porter
2019 Climate in motion : science, empire, and the problem of scale by Deborah R. Coen
2018 The courtiers' anatomists : animals and humans in Louis XIV's Paris by Anita Guerrini
2017 Fascist pigs : technoscientific organisms and the history of fascism by Tiago Saraiva
2016 Observing by hand : sketching the nebulae in the nineteenth century by Omar W. Nasim
2015 Ivan Pavlov : a Russian life in science by Daniel Todes
2014 Picturing the book of nature : image, text, and argument in sixteenth-century human anatomy and medical botany by Sachiko Kusukawa
2013 The romantic machines : utopian science and technology after Napoleon by John Tresch
2012 The crafting of 10,000 things : knowledge and technology in seventeenth-century China by Dagmar Schäfer
2011 Mathematics in ancient Iraq : a social history by Eleanor Robson
2010 Leibniz : an intellectual biography by Maria Rosa Antognazza
2009 Matters of exchange : commerce, medicine, and science in the Dutch Golden Age by Harold J. Cook
2008 The Jewel house : Elizabethan London and the scientific revolution by Deborah Harkness
2007 Drawing theories apart : the dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in postwar physics by David Kaiser
2006 Patterns of behavior : Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and the founding of ethology by Richard W. Burkhardt
2005 Alchemy tried in the fire : Starkey, Boyle, and the fate of Helmontian chymistry by William Newman and Lawrence Principe
2004 Charles Darwin : a biography, volume 2 : the power of place by Janet Browne
2003 The man who flattened the earth : Maupertuis and the sciences in the enlightenment by Mary Terrall
2002 Victorian sensation : the extraordinary publication, reception, and secret authorship of Vestiges of the natural history of creation by James Secord
2001 The sun in the church : cathedrals as solar observatories by John Heilbron
2000 The science of energy : a cultural history of energy physics in Victorian Britain by Crosbie Smith
1999 Wonders and the order of nature, 1150-1750 by Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park
1998 Image and logic : a material culture of microphysics by Peter Galison
1997 Women scientists in America : before affirmative action, 1940-1972 by Margaret W. Rossiter
1996 Possessing nature : museums, collecting, and scientific culture in early modern Italy by Paula Findlen
1995 The business of alchemy : science and culture in the Holy Roman Empire by Pamela H. Smith
1994 The meanings of sex difference in the Middle Ages : medicine, science, and culture by Joan Cadden
1993 Uncertainty : the life and science of Werner Heisenberg by David Cassidy
1992 The formation of science in Japan : building a research tradition by James R. Bartholomew
1991 The politics of evolution : morphology, medicine, and reform in radical London by Adrian Desmond; Physical chemistry from Ostwald to Pauling : the making of a science in America by John W. Servos
1990 Energy and empire : a biographical study of Lord Kelvin by Crosbie Smith and M. Norton Wise
1989 Classical probability in the Enlightenment by Lorraine J. Daston
1988 Darwin and the emergence of evolutionary theories of mind and behavior by Robert J. Richards
1987 Intellectual mastery of nature : theoretical physics from Ohm to Einstein by Christa Jungnickel and Russell McCormmach
1986 Revolution in science by I. Bernard Cohen
1985 Mathematical astronomy in Copernicus's De revolutionibus by Noel Swerdlow and Otto Neugebauer
1984 Black Apollo of science : the life of Ernest Everett Just by Kenneth R. Manning
1983 Never at rest : a biography of lsaac Newton by Richard S. Westfall
1982 Dawn of modern science : from the Arabs to Leonardo da Vinci by Thomas Goldstein
1981 Science and polity in France at the end of the Old Regime by Charles Coulston Gillispie
1980 Freud, biologist of the mind : beyond the psychoanalytic legend by Frank J. Sulloway
1979 Science in culture : the early Victorian period by Susan F. Cannon
1978 The chemical philosophy : Paracelsian science and medicine in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Allen G. Debus (volume 2 only here); Harpers Ferry Armory and the new technology : the challenge of change by Merritt Roe Smith
1977 The kind of motion we call heat : a history of the kinetic theory of gases in the 19th century by Stephen G. Brush
1976 A history of ancient mathematical astronomy by Otto Neugebauer
1975 Claude Bernard and animal chemistry : the emergence of a scientist by Frederic L. Holmes
1974 The edge of an unfamiliar world : a history of oceanography by Susan Schlee
1973 Molecules and life : historical essays on the interplay of chemistry and biology by Joseph Fruton
1972 Force in Newton's physics : the science of dynamics in the seventeenth century by Richard S. Westfall
1971 The Lysenko affair by David Joravsky
1970 The triumph of the Darwinian method by Michael Ghiselin
1969 Galen on the usefulness of the parts of the body by Margaret T. May
1968 Kepler's Somnium : the dream, or posthumous work on lunar astronomy by Edward Rosen
1967 Marcello Malpighi and the evolution of embryology by Howard B. Adelmann
1966 Michael Faraday : a biography by L. Pearce Williams
1965 Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 1514-1564 by Charles D. O'Malley
1964 The Lunar Society of Birmingham : a social history of provincial science and industry in eighteenth-century England by Robert E. Schofield
1963 Medieval technology and social change by Lynn White, Jr.
1962 Lavoisier-the crucial year : the background and origin of his first experiments on combustion in 1772 by Henry Guerlac
1961 A history of metallography : the development of ideas on the structure of metal before 1890 by Cyril Stanley Smith
1960 The science of mechanics in the Middle Ages by Marshall Clagett
1959 Robert Boyle and seventeenth-century chemistry by Marie Boas Hall
The Watson, Helen, Miles, and Audrey Davis Prize
This prize honors books in the history of science directed to a wide public (including undergraduate instruction). They should be introductory in assuming no previous knowledge of the subject and in being directed to audiences of beginning students and general readers. They should introduce an entire field, a chronological period, a national tradition, or the work of a noteworthy individual. Click History of Science Society for more information about the sponsor of these awards.
2022 Intelligent love : the story of Clara Park, her autistic daughter, and the myth of the refrigerator mother by Margo Vicedo
2021 Einstein's war : how relativity triumphed amid the vicious nationalism of World War I by Matthew Stanley
2020 Pain, pleasure, and the greater good : from the Panopticon to the Skinner box and beyond by Cathy Gere
2019 The lost white tribe : explorers, scientists, and the theory that changed a continent by Michael F. Robinson
2018 Orchid : a cultural history by Jim Endersby
2017 The dancing bees : Karl von Frisch and the discovery of the honeybee language by Tania Munz
2016 Arming Mother Nature : the birth of catastrophic environmentalism by Jacob Darwin Hamblin
2015 Earth's deep history : how it was discovered and why it matters by M. J. S. Rudwick
2014 The visioneers : how a group of elite scientists pursued space colonies, nanotechnologies, and a limitless future by W. Patrick McCray
2013 How the hippies saved physics : science, counterculture, and the quantum revival by David Kaiser
2012 Nature's ghosts : confronting extinction from the age of Jefferson to the age of ecology by Mark Barrow
2011 Merchants of doubt : how a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway
2010 The day we found the universe by Marcia Bartusiak
2009 Sun in a bottle : the strange history of fusion and the science of wishful thinking by Charles Seife
2008 Fathoming the ocean : the discovery and exploration of the deep sea by Helen Rozwadowski
2007 Francis Crick : discoverer of the genetic code by Matt Ridley
2006 Pandora's baby : how the first test tube babies sparked the reproductive revolution by Robin Marantz Henig
2005 Goldberger's war : the life and work of a public health crusader by Alan M. Kraut
2004 The Manhattan Project : big science and the atomic bomb by Jeff Hughes
2003 The measure of all things : the seven-year odyssey and hidden error that transformed the world by Ken Alder
2002 Revolutionizing the sciences : European knowledge and its ambitions, 1500-1700 by Peter Dear
2001 The gospel of germs : men, women, and the microbe in American life by Nancy Tomes
2000 Reel nature : America's romance with wildlife on film by Gregg Mitman
1999 The Baltimore case : a trial of politics, science and character by Daniel J. Kevles
1998 Lise Meitner : a life in physics by Ruth Lewin Sime
1997 Dark sun : the making of the hydrogen bomb by Richard Rhodes
1996 Newton and the culture of Newtonianism by Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs and Margaret C. Jacob
1995 A history of mathematics : an introduction by Victor J. Katz
1994 The beginnings of Western science : the European scientific tradition in philosophical, religious, and institutional context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450 by David C. Lindberg (2d ed. (2007) here)
1993 Darwin : the life of a tormented evolutionist by James Moore and Adrian Desmond
1992 Science and religion : some historical perspectives by John Hedley Brooke
1991 Medieval & early Renaissance medicine : an introduction to knowledge and practice by Nancy G. Siraisi
1990 The space telescope : a study of NASA science, technology, and policy by Robert W. Smith
1989 Fasting girls : the emergence of anorexia nervosa as a modern disease by Joan Jacobs Brumberg
1988 The dilemmas of an upright man : Max Planck as spokesman for German science by John L. Heilbron
1987 Science and the Enlightenment by Thomas L. Hankins
1986 The discoverers by Daniel J. Boorstin
The Suzanne J. Levinson Prize
This prize is awarded biennially for a book in the history of the life sciences and natural history. Click History of Science Society for more information about the sponsor of these awards.
2022 Blood relations : transfusion and the making of human genetics by Jenny Bangham
2020 Creatures of Cain : the hunt for human nature in Cold War America by Erika Lorraine Milam
2018 Darwin and the making of sexual selection by Evelleen Richards
2016 Haeckel's embryos : images, evolution, and fraud by Nick Hopwood
2014 Visible empire : botanical expeditions and visual culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment by Daniela Bleichmar
2012 Worlds before Adam : the reconstruction of geohistory in the age of reform by Martin Rudwick
2010 The simian tongue : the long debate about animal language by Gregory Radick
2008 Culturing life : how cells became technologies by Hannah Landecker
2006 Charles Darwin, geologist by Sandra Herbert