Tilli Tansey

Tilli Tansey is Professor of the history of modern medical sciences at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, University College London. She studied the neurochemistry of the Octopus brain for her PhD and spent many years working as a research neuroscientist in Sheffield, Edinburgh, Naples and London before taking a second doctorate in medical history, on the career of Sir Henry Dale (1875-1968).

She has published extensively in both historical and medical journals, specialising in physiology, neurosciences and pharmacology, and also published on medical research and the pharmaceutical industry. She is the co-editor of several volumes, including Women physiologists (Portland Press 1993); Ashes to Ashes - the history of smoking and health (Rodopi, 1998, reprinted 2003); and Wellcome witnesses to twentieth century medicine (Wellcome Trust, volumes 1 - 38, 1997-present). She co-wrote a history of the Burroughs Wellcome pharmaceutical company in Britain, which appeared in 2007, and is currently writing a book on medical laboratory technicians.

She is the only medical historian who is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, only the second to ever been elected (the first being the late Roy Porter), and was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London in 2008.