J. J. Finkelstein is William Laffan Professor of Assyriology and Babylonian Literature at Yale University. Moshe Greenberg is Abraham M. Ellis Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania. Both were students and colleagues of E. A. Speiser.
Henry E. Sigerist (1891–1957) was born in Switzerland and received an MD from the University of Zurich. Between 1932 and 1947, he served as Director of the Institute of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. The author of twenty-seven books, including American Medicine (1934), Socialized Medicine in the Soviet Union (1937), and two volumes of A History of Medicine (1951 and 1961), and over 450 articles, Sigerist was also a staunch advocate for "compulsory health insurance" and his research helped to shape Canada's national health care system. Elizabeth Fee is Chief Historian at the National Library of Medicine at the National Institute for Health. Her books include, as coeditor, Making Medical History: The Life and Times of Henry E. Sigerist; AIDS: The Making of a Chronic Disease; and Women Physicians and the Cultures of Medicine; and, as author, Disease and Discovery: A History of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, 1916–1939.
