Dr. Edward Shorter

Edward Shorter, a social historian with an extraordinary range, has written on problems connected with both Germany and France, and then published a general book on the making of the modern family. Subsequently he became particularly interested in the history of medicine. He has notably contributed to the understanding of women's encounters with ill health, and also gone on to examine the troubled history of doctors and their patients. Most recently he has been writing about the history of psychosomatic illness, on the sound premise that biology and culture interact in the production of symptoms. He is one of those exceptional people bridging medicine and social science, who at the same time has always sought to put our understanding of the past in a scholarly perspective which has
won him recognition both abroad as well as on this continent.