Dr Ian Mortimer is a prize-winning historian and the author of a series of historical biographies which retell later medieval English history through the lives of the most important characters. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and an Honorary Research Fellow of the University of Exeter.

Dr Ian Mortimer’s Ph.D thesis documents the increasing availability of medical assistance to the dying in seventeenth-century England. It is heavily based on surviving probate accounts for southern England, by far the best series of such documents being those of the Diocese of Canterbury. He compiled an index of all medical practitioners in Canterbury Diocese for the period 1560-1730 using not only the probate accounts but also diocesan/archiepiscopal licensing records, Canterbury freemen records, locally-archived indexes of wills and inventories as well as national medical degree and university licence records. The resulting directory records details of practitioner activity and includes more than 800 names. Such a wealth of data is unique in England. It thoroughly refutes the idea that medicine at this period was dominated by London practitioners.