Lynda Payne, Sirridge Missouri Endowed Professor in Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the SOM, Associate Professor of History, (M.A., University of Edinburgh, Scotland, 1977; 1985 A.S.N. (Nursing) SUNY, Albany, N.Y. Registered Nurse, State of California; 1983 Certified Respiratory Therapist, California College for Respiratory Therapy, San Diego, California; 1980 Diploma in Applied Social Sciences (Social Work) University of Surrey, England; Ph.D., University of California Davis, 1997). History of medicine, masculinity, Britain, emotions, 16th to 19th centuries. Author of With Words and Knives: Learning Medical Dispassion in Early Modern England, (2007), “Lovesickness: Female Insanity in Nineteenth-Century Opera” (2007).

My research examines the cultural values underlying the theory and practice of surgery in treating the universal human condition of being in pain. My first book examined how young men were turned into medical men in early modern England and the effect this had on their feelings toward themselves and their patients. My current research project explores the life of Percivall Pott, the best practical surgeon in eighteenth-century England and a prolific author. I am particularly interested in reconstructing the physical and emotional challenges for his wife, Sarah Potts, in running a "surgical household" that contained dozens of boarding medical pupils and hundreds of dissected specimens.

Dr. Payne’s work has been supported by grants from: The Friends-of-the-Library of the University of Wisconsin at Madison; The Klemperer Fellowship in the History of Medicine, New York Academy of Medicine; Wood Institute Fellowship, at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia; National Endowment for the Humanities, Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship Wood Institute Fellowship, at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia; Andrew W. Mellon Match Fellow of The Huntington Library; The Wellcome Trust, History of Medicine Travel Grant, and numerous other fellowships and grants from Oberlin College, University of California Davis, and UMKC.

In 2003-4, Dr. Payne also was awarded a Dean’s Outstanding Teaching Award for Regular Faculty at UMKC. Currently, Dr. Payne is Director of the Uppsala Sweden Summer Study Abroad Program.