After many decades of funding by the Wellcome Trust, ownership of the journal passed to Cambridge University Press in about 2011.

Its first editor was William John Bishop, the then librarian of the Wellcome Historical Medical Library.

[8] Vivian Nutton noted in 2007 that the journal had gone through four designs of its cover, several changes of its subtitle and "most striking" was the variations in the editorial board, described as "largely dormant and partly fictional" in the 1970s.

[2] The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London became fully responsible for the journal from 2005, when it also became available online via PubMed Central as a diamond Open Access publication supported by the Wellcome Trust.

Medical History has continued to be freely available at the PubMed Central website from 2005 until the present.