Charles Webster is primarily engaged in work on Theophrastus von Hohenheim (known also as Paracelsus). Following on from his recent Yale UP book, which was mainly concerned with religious and social thinking of Paracelsus, he is at an advanced stage of a further book, mainly concerned with the scientific and medical work for which Paracelsus is particularly well known. His aim, as with the previous book, is to take full account of the recent literature and to adopt a fresh perspective.
- Senior Research Fellow, All Souls College (from 1988 to 2004)
- Reader in the History of Medicine, University of Oxford and Fellow, Corpus Christi College, Oxford (from 1972 to 1988)
- Intellectual history
- History of the National Health Service and welfare state
- Samuel Hartlib and the Advancement of Learning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972).
- From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
- Problems of Health Care: the National Health Service before 1957 (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1988).
- Government and Health Care: The British National Health Service 1958–1979 (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1996).
- The Great Instauration, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2002).
- The National Health Service: A Political History, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
- Paracelsus. Medicine, Magic and Mission at the End of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).