Held on Wednesday, 16 September 2026 at 6:30pm

Venue: Apothecaries' Hall, Black Friar's Lane, London EC4V 6EJ

Presenting Templars, Hospitallers and Crusader Medical Care (Keats Memorial lecture)

To be given by Dr Dominic Selwood

To honour Keats and his context in the 18th-century medical practice. Military medicine has always been a speciality. As monastic foundations, the orders of crusading knights had in-house infirmaries for injured and ailing members. Their skill in medical care was also a resource they shared. Pilgrimage and crusade were arduous, exposing travellers to unfamiliar climates and diseases. The military orders took in the sick and provided them with beds, professional physicians, and all-round medical care, especially in the Crusader States. The knights' military and financial exploits have long fascinated the modern public, but the medieval public was as likely to know the crusading knights for their highly developed medical services.

Dr Dominic Selwood FSA FRHistS is a historian, barrister, author and honorary research fellow at the University of Exeter. He writes on history for the Daily Telegraph and other papers, and presents regularly on television and radio. He holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford and a DEA from the Sorbonne, both in medieval history

Presenting The Many Lives of the Medieval Wound Man (Flavell Lecture)

To be given by Dr Jack Hartnell

The Wound Man, a medical diagram depicting a figure fantastically pierced by weapons and ravaged by injuries and diseases—was reproduced widely across the medieval and early modern globe. In this lecture we will follow the figure through its over 600-year history, tracing the emergence and endurance of this striking curative image from medieval Europe to the present day.

Dr Jack Hartnell is Head of Research at the National Gallery, London. He is an art historian and curator whose work focuses on cross-continental visual cultures of premodern science, broadly defined to include the artistic materials of medicine, cartography, and mathematics, most recently with a strong emphasis on premodern Jewish art and culture. His books include Medieval Bodies (2018), which was a Sunday Times History Book of the Year, and Wound Man (2025), which won the 2026 Otto Gründler Prize for outstanding contribution to medieval studies.