Science student (HPS) Chiara Lacroix winner Best Master's Thesis 2022

During the Start of the Academic Year, History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) alum Chiara Lacroix won Best Master’s Thesis 2022. In her thesis, she examined how the concept of ‘man’ and ‘humanity’ develops in English and French medical literature. She was supervised by Hieke Huistra from the Freudenthal Institute.

See the award ceremony in the video from 1 hours and 16 seconds:

What do we consider to be ‘human’?

Chiara has pored over huge piles of English and French medical literature to find a pattern in how humans are considered in relation to time. Despite the clinical texts on reproduction in all its facets, a beautiful picture emerged: how over the centuries the awareness of what can be considered human changed, as did the concept of 'humanity'. Not only biological research but also culture and history have (had) an influence on how man is described and considered.

All this comes together in a beautiful thesis that the jury unanimously admired as original, well-written and hard work.

International Roy Porter Prize

Earlier this summer, Science alum Martijn van der Meer received the international Roy Porter Prize of the Society for the Social History of Medicine for his HPS thesis on Dutch eugenicists and their call for optimising development conditions, 1919-1939, supervised by Frank Huisman.

See for more information: https://sshm.org/the-roy-porter-prize-articles/