The medal honors Richard Harrison Shryock (1893–1972), a pioneer among historians interested in the history of medicine. It was first awarded in 1984.

2024: Bethany Snyder, University of Kansas School of Medicine, “The ‘Venery’ of Venereal Disease: Tracing the Evolcing Moral Landscape of STI Public Health Art Through the 20th Century” 

2023 — Yixue Yang, Department of History, University of California, San Diego, “Revolutionary Youth: Myopia, Socialist Youth and Public Health Campaigns in China, 1960-1976”

2022 — Joseph Bishop, Department of History, New York University, “From Shadowgraphy to Radiology: How Physicians Leveraged Early Hospital X-ray Machines to Supplant Photographers”

2021–Gina Surita, Princeton University Department of History,
“Gendered Hormonal Binaries and the Development of the Concept of Hormone-Dependent Cancers, 1940-1990.”

2020–Emer Lucey, University of Wisconsin-Madison,
“Beauty and Joy: The Aesthetics of Autism and Down Syndrome”
Honorable mention: Brad Bolman, Harvard University, “In the Animal House: Salvage, Rabies, and Labor in Birmingham”
Honorable mention: Sara Ray, University of Pennsylvania, “Origin Stories: Mothers, Midwives, and Monstrous Births”

2019–Kevin George McQueeney, Department of History, Georgetown University,
“The City That Care Forgot: The Long Civil Rights Struggle Over African American Health and the Perpetuation of Apartheid Healthcare in Twentieth-Century New Orleans”
Honorable mention: Spencer J. Weinreich, Department of History, Princeton University, “Legal and Medical Authority in the Newgate Smallpox Experiment (1721)”

2018–Margaret Vigil-Fowler (University of California, San Francisco)
“More Than Icons: A Granular Approach to Exposing the Hidden History of African American Students at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania”
Honorable Mention: Annelie Drakman (Uppsula University)
“The Closing of the Open Body: A Rationale for the Nineteenth-Century Avandonment of Bloodletting”

2017–Wangui Muigai (Princeton University)
“All My Babies: Black Midwifery and Health Training Films in the 1950s”
First honorable mention: Vicki (Fama) Daniel (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
“Medical Identification and the Emergence of a Forensic Paradigm at the 1949 Noronic Disaster”
Second honorable mention: Elaine La Fay (University of Pennsylvania) “‘The slandered torrid zone’: Medicine, Botany, and Imperial Visions of the American Tropics along the US Gulf Coast, 1820-1840″

2016–Marco A. Ramos (Yale University)
“Making Disappearance Visible: Medical Humanitarian Research on State Violence in Argentina, 1976 to 1983”
Honorable Mention: Travis A. Weisse (University of Wisconsin at Madison)
“’A Farewell to Chitterlings’: Alvenia Fulton, Natural Health Foods, and the Civil Rights Movement”

2015–Marissa Mika, (University of Pennsylvania),
“Surviving Experiments: Burkitt’s Lymphoma Research in Idi Amin’s Uganda”
Honorable Mention: Cara Kiernan Fallon, (Harvard University),
“Husbands’ Hearts and Women’s Health: Gender and Heart Disease in Twentieth-Century America”

2014–Mary Augusta Brazelton, (Yale University),
“Peking Union Medical College and the Politics of Medical Education in the Early People’s Republic of China, 1949-56.”

2013–Alicia Puglionesi (Johns Hopkins University),
“‘Your Whole Effort Has Been to Create Desire’: Reproducing Knowledge and Evading Censorship in the Nineteenth‐Century Subscription Press”
Honorable Mention: Vicki Daniel (University of Wisconsin),
“Heroes and Villians: Displaying and Viewing Bodies at the United States Army Medical Museum, 1862–1888”

2012–Evan Ragland (Indiana University),
“Making Trials in Sixteenth-Century Medicine: On the History of Experimentation from Early Modern Medicine to Science”

2011–Daniel Trambaiolo (Princeton University),
“Vaccination and the Politics of Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Japan”

2010—Carin Berkowitz (University of Pennsylvania)
“The Aesthetics of Anatomy: Visual Displays and Surgical Education in Early Nineteenth-Century London”

2009–Andrew T. Simpson (Carnegie Mellon University),
“Transporting Lazarus: EMS Policy Making and Professionalization, 1966-1973”
Honorable Mention: Katja Guenther (Harvard University)
“A Federation of Nerves—Metaphors of the Nervous System in Imperial German Neuroscience”
Honorable Mention: Julia F. Irwin (Yale University),
“Nurses without Borders: Health, Medicine, and the Structure of American Global Power”

2008–Stephen E. Mawdsley (University of Alberta),
“Polio and Prejudice: Charles Hudson Bynum and the Racial Politics of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, 1944-1954.”

2007–Dea H. Boster (University of Michigan),
“An ‘epeleptick’ Bondswoman: Fits, Slavery, and Power in the Antebellum South”
Honorable mention: Jennifer Clark (Harvard University),
“Lou Gehrig’s Disease”

2006–Darcy Hughes Heuring (Northwestern University),
“All tainted as they are: Wet Nurses, Medical Men and Social Reform in Victorian Britain, 1858-1872.”
Honorable mention: Matthew Gambino (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), “Voice of the Patients: Mental Illness, Institutional Newspapers and Patient Life at St Elizabeth’s Hospital (Washington, DC) in the Twentieth Century”

2005–Alisha Rankin (Harvard University),
“Duchess, Heal Thyself: Recipes, Physicians, and the Diseases of Elisabeth of Rochlitz (1502-57)”
Honorable mention: Andrew Ray Ruis (University of Wisconsin)
“Bringing the Laboratory to the Street: The Bacteriological Diagnosis of Diphtheria in Late Nineteenth-Century New York”
Honorable Mention: Miriam Gross (University of California, San Diego)
“Healthy Children, Mighty Nation: Synthesizing Western and Chinese Medicine in Late Qing Health and Morality Books”

2004–Jeremy Greene (Harvard University),
“Releasing the Flood Waters: Diuril and the Reshaping of Hypertension”
Honorable mention: David G. Schuster (University of California, Santa Barbara),
“Personalizing illness in the shadow of modernity: S. Weir Mitchell, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Amelia Gere Mason, and a Reassessment of Neurasthenia, 1870-1914”

2003–Kevin T. Grau (Indiana University),
“‘A peculiar and domestic Scourge to our English infants’’: English medicine and the representation of rickets”
Honorable Mention: Gerard J. Fitzgerald (Carnegie Mellon University),
“The Bugaboo of Bugville: the Westinghouse sterilamp and the technological challenge of airborne disease, 1930-1947”
Honorable Mention: Gretchen Krueger (Yale University),
“’Death be not proud’: children, families, and cancer in postwar America”

2002–Amir Afkhami (Yale University),
“Infection, Jihad and Achieving the Virtues of Civilization: The Social Impact of the 1889-1892 Cholera and Influenza Epidemics in Iran.”
Honorable Mention: David Herzberg (University of Wisconsin-Madison),
“Wonder Drugs or Controlled Substances?: Theories of Addiction and Minor Tranquilizers in America, 1955-1975”
Honorable Mention: Sabine Marx (Carnegie Mellon University),
“The Rise of Scientific Medicine? Doctors, Patients and the State in Germany, 1880-1914”

2001–Lara Freidenfelds (Harvard University),
“Henry Knowles Beecher’s ‘Ethics and Clinical Research’”
Honorable Mention: Carole Emberton (Northwestern University),
“To produce an A1 nation: the frontier nursing service, women’s health, and the problem of the South, 1920-1930”

2000–No award

1999–Karen Kruse Thomas (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill),
“Yelling ‘Socialized medicine’: race, national health policy, and the medical profession in North Carolina, 1940-1945”
Honorable mention: Arthur Daemmerich (Cornell University),
“A tale of two experts: thalidomide and political engagement in the United States and West Germany”

1998–Erika Wojcuik (Princeton University),
“Forming the Gordian Knot: The Establishment of a Genetic Etiology for Tourette Syndrome, 1970s-1990s”

1997–Victoria Sweet (University of California, San Francisco),
“Re-reading medieval medicine: Hildegard of Bingen and the greening of the Middle Ages”
Honorable Mention: Rachel I Rosner (York University, Ontario; and Harvard University),
“The mind-body problem in German medicine, 1890-1910”

1996–Johannes C. Pols, (University of Pennsylvania),
“‘When He Comes Home Nervous’: War Neurosis, Rehabilitation, and the Psychoneuroti after World War II.”
Honorable mention: Ronald Rudy Higgens-Evenson (University of Oregon),
“‘Direct from the Insane Asylum’: Doctors and Public Policy in Oregon, 1862-1900”

1995–Alexandra M. Lord (University of Wisconsin),
“Medical Men and Menstruation: The Impact of Hoerhaavian Paradigm on Eighteenth-Century British Medical Theory and Practice.”

1994–Walton O. Schalick, III (Johns Hopkins University),
“Add one part pharmacy to one part surgery and one part medicine: Jean de Saint-Amand and the development of medical pharmacology in late thirteenth-century Paris”
Honorable Mention: Walter J. Vanast (University of Wisconsin),
“Our girls have left us for the better land: the relationship of mission policy to tuberculosis mortality at a northern Canadian Indian boarding school, 1924-25”

1993–Elizabeth Haiken (University of California, Berkeley),
“Plastic Surgery and American Beauty at 1921.”
Honorable Mention: Caroline J. Acker (University of California, San Francisco),
“The addict and the psychiatrist: Lawrence Kolb and the psychiatric theory of addiction”
Honorable Mention: Alice Domurat Dreger (Indiana University),
“Doubtful sex and doubtful status: hermaphrodites and doctors in Victorian England”

1992–Barron H. Lerner (University of Washington),
“Abdominal Paracentesis: A Cau\sualty of Curative Medical Therapeutics”

1991–David S. Barnes (University of California, Berkeley),
“Dissenting Voices: Left-Wing Perspectives on Tuberculosis in France, 1880-1914.”

1990–Paul Niermann (Temple University),
“Cautious Public Health Revolutionary: Samuel Givson Dixon, Pennsylvania’s First State Health Commissioner, 1905-1918”
Honorable Mention: Keith Wailoo (University of Pennsylvania) and Margaret L. Grimshaw (san Diego State University)

1989–Louise Breen (University of Connecticut),
“Cotton Mather, the ‘Angelical Ministry,’ and inoculation”
Honorable Mention: Kristie Lindenmeyer Dick (University of Cincinnati),
“Physicians and birth control: a Cincinnati episode, 1924-1931”

1988–Steven Robert Wilf (Yale University),
“Anatomy and Punishment in late eighteenth-century New York”
Honorable Mention: Carol Summers (Johns Hopkins University),
“Medical Evangelism: the Church Missionary Society in Buganda, 1878-1905”

1987–Shigehisa Kuriyama (University of New Hampshire),
“Rethinking the history of anatomy: the origins of Greek dissection”
Honorable Mention: Patricia A. Watson (Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine),
“The influence of iatrochemistry on the preacher-physicians of Puritan New England”
Honorable Mention: Micaela Sullivan-Fowler (Loyola University),
“Tyrell’s ‘Internal Baths’: the enema, autointoxication, and quackery in the early twentieth century”

1986–Sheila M. Penney (Dalhousie University),
“Nova Scotia, 1900-1914: a case study of the sanatorium solution to tuberculosis”

1985–Jack D. Pressman (University of Pennsylvania),
“Sufficient promise: John F. Fulton and the development of psychosurgery”

1984–John Harley Warner (Harvard University),
“The selective transport of medical knowledge: antebellum American physicians and Parisian medical therapeutics”