This award, named in honor of former AAHM Secretary-Treasurer Dr. J. Worth Estes, was first awarded in 2000.

2025 —Michael Stanley-Baker, “Mapping the Bencao: Laoguanshan at the Far End of the Yellow River Corridor,” Asian Medicine 18 (2024): 260-303.

2024 — Yu Hoki, “Syncretic and Diachronic Factors Influencing Medieval Arabic Medical Practice: A Study of Ophthamalogical Fragments Found in the Cairo Geniza,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 96 (September 2022): 1-33. 

2023 — Melissa Reynolds, “The Surugia of Nicolas Neesbett: Writing Medical Authority in Later Medieval England,” Social History of Medicine, 35, no. 1 (February 2022): 144–169.

2022 — Petros Bouras-Vallianatos, “Cross-cultural Transfer of Medical Knowledge in the Medieval Mediterranean: The Introduction and Dissemination of Sugar-based Potions from the Islamic World to Byzantium,” Speculum 96.4 (2021): 963-1008

2021 — Beatriz Puentes-Ballesteros, “Chocolate in China: Interweaving cultural histories of an imperfectly connected world,” in Harold Cook (ed.), Translation at Word: Chinese Medicine in the First Global Age (Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2020)

2020 — Sabrina Minuzzi “‘Quick to say Quack’ Medicinal Secrets from the Household to the Apothecary’s Shop in Eighteenth-century Venice,” Social History of Medicine 32 2019): 1-33

2019 –Aimee Medeiros and Elizabeth Siegel Watkins, “Live Longer Better: The Historical Roots of Human Growth Hormone as Anti-Aging Medicine, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 73 (2018): 333-359

2018 –David Herzberg, “Entitled to Addiction? Pharmaceuticals, Race, and America’s First Drug War,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 91 (2018): 585-623

2017–Anna E. Winterbottom, “Of the China Root: A Case Study of the Early Modern Circulation of Materia Medica.” Social History of Medicine 28 (2015): 22-44

2016 –Dora Vargha, “Between East and West: Polio Vaccination across the Iron Curtain in Cold War Hungary” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 88 (2014): 319-342

2015 – Hoi-eun Kim, “Cure for Empire: The ‘Conuer-Russia-Pill,’ Pharmaceutical Manufacturers, and the Making of Patriotic Japanese, 1904-45,” Medical History, 57 (2013): 249-68

2014 – Cynthia Connolly, Janet Golden, and Benjamin Schneider, “A Startling New Chemotherapeutic Agent: Pediatric Infectious Disease and the Introduction of Sulfonamides at Baltimore’s Sydenham Hospital,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 86 (2012): 66-93

2013—Daniel Carpenter and Dominique A. Tobbell, “Bioequivalence: The Regulatory Career of a Pharmaceutical Concept” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 85 (2011): 93–131

2012 – Justin Barr, “A Short History of Dapsone, or an Alternative Model of Drug Development,” Journal of History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 66 (2011): 425-67

2011 – Scott Podolsky and Jeremy Greene, “Keeping Modern in Medicine: Pharmaceutical Promotion and Physician Education in Postwar America,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 83 (2009): 331-378

2010 – Patrick Wallis, “Consumption, Retailing, and Medicine in Early-Modern London” The Economic History Review 61 (2008): 26-53

2009 – Elaine Leong, “Making Medicines in the Early Modern Household” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 82 (2008): 145-168

2008 – Jonathan Simon, “Emil Behring’s Medical Culture: From Disinfection to Serotherapy,” Medical History, 51 (2007): 201-218

2007 – Nicholas Rasmussen, “Making the first Anti-Depressant: Amphetamine in American Medicine 1929-1950,” Journal of History of Medicine and Allied Science 61 (2006): 288-323

2006 – Stephen Snelders, Charles Kaplan, and Toine Pieters, “On Cannabis, Chloral Hydrate, and Career Cycles of Psychotropic Drugs in Medicine,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 80 (2006): 95-114

2005 – Londa Schiebinger, “Feminist History of Colonial Science,” Hypatia, 19 (Winter 2004): 233-254

2004 – Paulo A. Porto, “Summus atque felicissimus salium: the medical relevance of the Liquor alkahest,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76 (2002): 1-29

2003 – Christiane Sinding, “Making the Unit of Insulin: Standards, Clinical Work, and Industry, 1920-1925,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76 (2002): 231-270

2002 – Jacalyn M. Duffin, ”The Spindle: Serendipity and the Discovery of Anti-Tumor Properties of the Vinca Alkaloids,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 17 (2000): 155-192

2001 – Leo B. Slater, “Industry and Academy: The Synthesis of Steroids,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 30 (2000): 442-480

2000 – Victoria Sweet: “Hildegard of Bingen and the Greening of Medieval Medicine,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 73 (1999):381-403