Nancy Siraisi
American medical historian
Nancy Gillian Siraisi (1932 – April 24, 2026) was an American historian of medicine and distinguished professor emerita in history at Hunter College and City University of New York.
Life and career
Siraisi received a B.A. (1953) and an M.A. (1958) from the University of Oxford and a Ph.D. (1970) from the City University of New York. She was a professor of history at Hunter College (1970–2003) and the Graduate Center (1976–2003) at the City University of New York, where she studied under Pearl Kibre.
She was a leading scholar in the history of medicine and science of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Her research ranged widely across these two distinct fields, from her first book on the university curriculum in medieval Padua to her work on the role of doctors in history-writing in the Renaissance.
Through her numerous publications and professional activities, Siraisi contributed to the growth of the history of science and medicine while also fostering the continued close interaction of these fields with "mainstream" history, notably through her faithful teaching of general medieval and Renaissance history and her insistence on careful contextualization.
Siraisi died on April 24, 2026, at the age of 93.
Awards and honors
1997 Elected to the American Philosophical Society
2003 George Sarton Medal
2008 MacArthur Fellows Program
2010 Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lecturer by the American Council of Learned Societies.
2016 Gustav Neuenschwander Prize
Works
Taddeo Alderotti and His Pupils: Two Generations of Italian Medical Learning, Books on Demand, 1981, ISBN 978-0-7837-9445-7
The clock and the mirror: Girolamo Cardano and Renaissance medicine, Princeton University Press, 1997, ISBN 978-0-691-01189-9
Medicine and the Italian universities, 1250-1600, BRILL, 2001, ISBN 9789004119420
History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning, University of Michigan Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-472-11602-7
Communities of Learned Experience: Epistolary Medicine in the Renaissance.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Nancy Siraisi” as american medical historian. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1964529. VIAF identifies the subject as 27095702. The Library of Congress control number is n80095826. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1932, 2026, 1953 and 1958.
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