Kevin Brown (historian of medicine)



Kevin Brown (b. 1961) has been Trust Archivist and Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum Curator at St Mary's NHS Trust, subsequently Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, since 1989, having set up the archives service for St Mary's Hospital, Paddington, London, England, in 1989 and having established the museum in 1993.

Brown was educated at Hertford College, Oxford and at University College London. He is a professional archivist and museum curator specialising in the history of medicine and has lectured widely. In 2001, he was the first historian and first non-scientist to deliver the Andrew J. Moyer Lecture at the United States Department of Agriculture National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research at Peoria, Illinois. He was Chairman of the London Museums of Health & Medicine from 2001 to 2004. He is an authority on Alexander Fleming and the history of penicillin.

Brown's 2004 biography of Alexander Fleming, Penicillin Man: Alexander Fleming and the Antibiotic Revolution tells the story of the discovery of penicillin and of the great scientist who made that breakthrough. He has also written a history of syphilis, The Pox: the Life and Near Death of a Very Social Disease in 2006 and has since turned his attention to a study of health, war and medicine in the 20th century.