David Wootton (historian)

• 1. Introduction

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  David Wootton published Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates in 2006. The title does not hedge. It names medicine's history of harm as a problem reaching all the way back to antiquity. Wootton was born on the 15th of January 1952. He is Anniversary Professor of History at the University of York. His career has circled a persistent question: how confidently did people in the past understand the world, and how often were they mistaken?

• 2. Renaissance to Revolution

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  Wootton's first book appeared in 1983. Paolo Sarpi: Between Renaissance and Enlightenment positioned its subject at the intellectual border between two transformative historical eras. A paperback edition followed in 2002. In 2010 came Galileo: Watcher of the Skies, a title that frames its subject in the act of observation. The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution appeared in 2015. It became a finalist for the Cundill History Prize in 2016. In 2008, well before these later books, the British Academy had already offered Wootton the Raleigh Lecture. It was the first of several named invitations that would follow over the next nine years.

• 3. Oxford and Boston

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  In 2014, Wootton delivered the Carlyle Lectures at the University of Oxford. Three years later, in 2017, he returned to Oxford to give the Besterman Lecture at Oxford University. In the same year as the Carlyle Lectures, Wootton also gave the Benedict Lectures at Boston University. Of his four named lecture series, the Benedict was the only one delivered outside Britain. The year after the Besterman Lecture, Wootton published Power, Pleasure, and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison.