Dorothy Porter is Professor in the History of Health Sciences and Chair of the Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California San Francisco. Her last monograph was published by Routledge entitled Health, Civilisation and the State. A History of Public Health from Ancient to Modern Times (1999). She is currently writing a history of the relationship between the social sciences and medicine in twentieth-century Britain and examining the emergence of life-style medicine in the post-war period. Earlier monographs, which she wrote with Roy Porter, examined the experiences of health and illness of doctors and patients within the context of the eighteenth century Enlightenment: Patient's Progress. Doctors and Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England, (Stanford University Press, 1989); In Sickness and In Health: the British Experience 1650-1850 (Fourth Estate Books & Basil Blackwell, 1988)]. She has edited numerous volumes on the history of social medicine, medical ethics, public health and the politics of medicine and published widely in academic journals in history, literary studies and in medical journals including the BMJ and The Lancet.