Anderson was born and educated in Melbourne, Australia, where he attended the University High School. His father, Hugh McDonald Anderson, was a leading folklorist and historian of Australian popular and literary culture, with more than forty books to his credit; his mother, Dawn Anderson, has written books on drama education and creativity. Anderson graduated from the University of Melbourne Medical School with a Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery in 1983. During the medical course he conducted neurophysiology research, supervised by Ian Darian-Smith, which earned him a Bachelor of Medical Sciences. He was an intern at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, and had paediatric training at the Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne, and the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford. In the 1986 season he was the assistant doctor for the Footscray Football Club. From 1987, he worked in general practice in the inner west of Melbourne, which he continued intermittently until 1999. Anderson was a co-presenter on the award-winning radio program "Spoonful of Medicine" from 1987–88.
Poetry
As a medical student, Anderson began writing and publishing poetry. More than forty poems have appeared in a range of leading journals in Australia and the US. His poetry collection, Hard Cases, Brief Lives was short-listed in 2012 for the Mary Gilmore Award of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature.
Anderson completed a Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. His dissertation was on US colonial medicine and public health in the Philippines, and his advisor was Charles E. Rosenberg. Before moving to Sydney, Anderson held appointments at Harvard University ; the University of Melbourne ; University of California, San Francisco and University of California, Berkeley ; and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. At Melbourne, he founded the Centre for Health and Society, and helped to establish the Onemda VicHealth Koori Health Unit. At Madison, he was chair of the Department of Medical History and Bioethics. Anderson was the founding editor of Health and History, and served as associate editor for the East Asian STS Journal and Postcolonial Studies. He served on the councils of the American Association of the History of Medicine, the Australian and New Zealand Society for the History of Medicine, the Australian Society of Health, Law and Ethics, History of Medicine in Southeast Asia, the Institute of Postcolonial Studies, and the Pacific Circle. Anderson was awarded a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and he was a Frederick Burkhardt Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, which he held at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. In 2013 he was a Whitney J. Oates Fellow at the Humanities Council, Princeton University and a John Hope Franklin Fellow at Duke University. Among Anderson's key publications are:
. Awarded the W.K. Hancock Prize of the Australian Historical Association and the Basic Books Prize in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology. The research for this book was recognised in the award of the M.D. degree from the University of Melbourne.
. Awarded the NSW Premier’s General History Prize, William H. Welch Medal of the AAHM and the Ludwik Fleck Award of the Society for Social Studies of Science.
, with Ian R. Mackay. Awarded the NSW Premier's General History Prize.
, ed. with Deborah Jenson and Richard C. Keller.
Additionally he is the author of more than 60 articles and book chapters.
Postcolonial studies of science and medicine
Anderson has published a number of manifestos for postcolonial approaches to explaining the globalisation of science and medicine, including:
Where is the postcolonial history of medicine? Bulletin of the History of Medicine. 1998; 72: 522–30
Postcolonial histories of medicine. In: Medical History: The Stories and Their Meanings, 285–307. Ed. John Harley Warner and Frank Huisman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press; 2004
Pramoedya’s chickens: postcolonial studies of technoscience. In: The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 3rd ed., 181–204. Ed. Edward J. Hackett, Olga Amsterdamska, Michael Lynch, and Judy Wajcman. Cambridge MA: MIT Press; 2007
From subjugated knowledge to conjugated subjects: science and globalisation, or postcolonial studies of science? Postcolonial Studies. 2009; 12: 389–400
In 2011, the Australian Research Council awarded Anderson a Laureate Fellowship, making him the first historian to receive this award and the only applicant from the humanities to receive a fellowship in the initial round. The fellowship supported comparative, transnational research in the history of ideas of race and human difference in the Global South. These studies involved collaborators from Brazil, New Zealand, and South Africa, and over the course of the fellowship supported six post-doctoral fellows.
