Emily Mayhew is shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize 2014 for Wounded. Wounded is the story of a journey: from injury on the battlefield to recovery in Britain. It is the story of the soldiers themselves, from the aid post in the trenches to the casualty clearing station in the rear, from the base hospital to the ambulance train returning them to Blighty. But it is also the story of those who cared for them – stretcher bearers and medical officers, surgeons and chaplains, nurses and ambulance drivers. People on the verge of collapse, overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of casualties and terrible injuries who, with determination and improvisation, saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Wounded is the story of the men and women who made it possible. Assembled from dozens of previously unused archival sources, this is the first comprehensive account of medical care at the Western Front.

Sarah Wise is nominated for the Wellcome Book Prize 2014 for Inconvenient People. This highly original book brilliantly exposes the phenomenon of false allegations of lunacy (and the dark motives behind them...) in the Victorian period. Gaslight tales of rooftop escapes, men and women snatched in broad daylight, patients shut in coffins, a fanatical cult known as the Abode of Love… The nineteenth century saw repeated panics about sane individuals being locked away in lunatic asylums. With the rise of the ‘mad-doctor’ profession, English liberty seemed to be threatened by a new generation of medical men willing to incarcerate difficult family members in return for the high fees paid by an unscrupulous spouse or friend. Sarah Wise uncovers twelve shocking stories, untold for over a century and reveals the darker side of the Victorian upper and middle classes – their sexuality, fears of inherited madness, financial greed and fraudulence – and chillingly evoke the black motives at the heart of the phenomenon of the ‘inconvenient person’.