A Tribute to Caroline Catherine Hannaway (1943–2024)

Abstract

• A Tribute to Caroline Catherine Hannaway (1943–2024)
• Sharon E. Kingsland and Jeremy A. Greene

Caroline Catherine Hannaway (née Moorhouse), a historian of medicine with close ties to the Johns Hopkins Departments of History of Medicine and History of Science and Technology for many years, passed away on March 14, 2024. Caroline was born in Melbourne, Australia, on August 22, 1943. Her father, Charles Edmund Moorhouse (1911–2002), was a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Melbourne. Her mother, Catherine Albright Moorhouse (née Manderson; 1914–1989), was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, later becoming an Australian citizen. Caroline grew up in Melbourne along with her sister, Jane, and her brother, Weston.

Caroline’s undergraduate studies in the 1960s were in the history and philosophy of science at the University of Melbourne. Students were expected to study the history of all sciences, including astronomy, physics, mathematics, chemistry, and biology. Caroline did not intend originally to be a historian of medicine, but there was one seminar in the history of nineteenth-century British medicine, taught by Diana Dyason, that piqued her interest because the course focused on reading primary texts.¹ She decided to leave Australia for graduate study in Baltimore at the Institute of the History of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University, which had offered her tuition and a fellowship. She ended up staying in Baltimore after graduation, not her original intent, because she met Owen Hannaway, historian of chemistry in the History of Science Department. Owen was a brilliant and creative scholar, teacher, and raconteur. They fell in love, married in 1969, and were a devoted couple until Owen’s death in 2006. Since Owen was from Glasgow, they enjoyed not only visits to Scotland over the years, but also the Scottish and Celtic festivals in Maryland.

Both Owen and William Coleman, who was historian of biology and medicine in the Department of History of Science, encouraged Caroline’s interests in French medicine, which became the subject of her doctoral [End Page v] dissertation. Coleman had pointed out the obvious advantages to working on French history, namely that one could spend weeks in Paris enjoying the food and historical surroundings as well as having adventures in the archives. She and Owen took this advice to heart, spending many summers in France working on various projects. But digging in the archives for her dissertation research presented many challenges and required perseverance. The records she needed were in the Academy of Medicine in Paris, but prospective users had first to persuade the porter to open the street door to allow entry, then thread their way along corridors and stairways mostly in the dark: “The keeper of the archives saw herself as the guardian of treasures to be protected rather than the facilitator of use. No inventory existed nor any finding guides and I, as researcher, had 115

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Caroline Catherine Hannaway, Ph.D. Photograph from Dr. Hannaway’s collection.

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boxes of uncatalogued materials randomly ordered to work through.”² But work through them she did.

She completed her Ph.D. dissertation, entitled “Medicine, Public Welfare and the State in Eighteenth Century France: The Société Royale de Médicine of Paris (1776–1793),” in 1974. Her publications on French medicine include a study of how the founding of the short-lived Société helped to forge links between the medical profession and the administrative structures of the State, and a study of veterinary medicine and rural health care in prerevolutionary France.³ In 1998 she and Ann La Berge co-edited a volume on Constructing Paris Medicine, which involved a reappraisal of the scholarship of Erwin Ackerknecht, who for many years had been a dominant voice in the history of Paris medicine from the French Revolution to the 1830s. That volume offered new interpretations that debunked many myths about that period.

The Institute of the History of Medicine housed the editorial office for the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, the journal of the American Association for the History of Medicine. In 1979 Caroline became the journal’s associate editor and in 1983 its editor. In the 1980s...