Liz Willis joined the editorial board of Medicine and War (as Medicine Conflict and Survival was then called) in 1991 and remained on it until her death very recently.
She was a regular contributor to MCS. The journal’s website credits her as author of well over 100 items. In the early days, she undertook the (pre-internet) laborious task of identifying and summarizing pertinent articles in other publications; she wrote many perceptive book reviews in which she never drew back from being critical; and she contributed about 20 original articles over a wide range of subjects. Her scholarship was meticulous and everything she wrote needed next to no editing. She had a quiet sense of humour which sometimes surfaced in what she wrote: one paper for MCS was titled ‘Landscape with Dead Sheep: What They Did to Gruinard Island’, another ‘Seascape with monkeys and guinea‐pigs: Britain’s biological weapons research programme, 1948–54ʹ.
Her passion was radical history and her contribution to this field in MCS was only a small part of her output. She was author of the Radical History Network blog, and of the Smothpubs Blogspot, the latter mostly to do with Scotland, reflecting her Scottish heritage – she was born in 1947 in Stornoway.
Liz was not an assertive person, but I always valued her presence at MCS board meetings, which she attended very regularly, because I sensed that she was the guardian of the journal’s integrity with her deep knowledge of its history and mutations – invaluable to a latecomer like me.
We’re saddened by her death and will miss her a great deal.