Mary E. Fissell is the Inaugural J. Mario Molina Professor of the History of Medicine in the Department of the History of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University, where she also holds appointments in the Departments of History and History of Science and Technology. She currently serves as president of the AAHM, having edited the Bulletin of the History of Medicine for 15 years. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the NLM, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Davis Center at Princeton University.

Her scholarly work has focused on the patient’s perspective in the history of medicine; gender, sexuality, and the history of the body; popular culture; and books and reading in early modern England and the Atlantic world. Her book Vernacular Bodies (Oxford, 2004) analyzed how everyday ideas about making babies mediated large scale social, political, and religious change. Her new book is on the long history of abortion, published by Seal/Basic Books in the USA and Hurst in the UK. Fissell will then return to her book manuscript about Aristotle’s Masterpiece, the best-selling early-modern book on sex and reproduction. First published in 1684, it was still for sale, little-altered, in sleazy London sex shops of the 1920s. She seeks to develop new ways to think about what we used to call “popular” knowledge, ways that make it both more and less than the trickledown of elite thinking.