History of Medicine: People and projects
Get to know our endowed Hannah Chairs and other
funding recipients. Be inspired by their work.
Hannah Chairs
Through permanent endowment these eight professors teach the history of medicine in healthcare education. Learn about their exceptional backgrounds and research interests.
Dr. Darrel Manitowabi
Post-Doctoral Fellows
Exploring ethics and Canadian clinical cancer trials, 1978-1998
My AMS postdoctoral research project examines an historical trajectory shaping clinical research and its regulation in Canada.
Weapons of mass pollution: health and environmental hazards in Canada’s munitions industry during the Second World War
This project sits at the intersection of medical, environmental, and military history. It will teach us about the history of toxicity and risk prevention related to workplace safety, medical treatments, and decontamination methods in the 1940s. During the Second World War, Canadian industries produced about 4.4 billion rounds of ammunition, 72 million artillery shells, and…
Manuscripting English medical knowledge in the early age of print
My postdoctoral research focuses on how individuals, and especially medical practitioners, adapted and personalised printed medical treatises by copying these often long (and sometimes learned) texts into manuscript in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. To understand the production and use of medical knowledge in the early modern era, we must consider manuscripts and printed texts…
The histories of military funding and medical science in Cold War Canada
Matthew called his AMS project, “Cold Soldiers: Medical Scientist Alan C. Burton and Military Experimentation in Cold War Canada”. It examined Burton’s postwar research contributions to military science in Canada. His work for the Defence Research Board is important for medical historians because it shows the entangled histories of military funding and medical science in…
Exploring the history of natural childbirth in Canada and the world
As an AMS Postdoctoral Fellow, Whitney continued the research for her second book manuscript, tentatively titled “A New Way to Birth? Natural Childbirth in Canada and the World, 1930-2000”. She also began an oral history project to explores attitudes towards natural childbirth in twentieth century Canada.
A system of care and control: British naval medicine 1790-1815
Erin is currently finishing her PhD at the University of Saskatchewan before commencing her Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Oxford in March 2018. Erin’s postdoctoral research “A System of Care and Control: British Naval Medicine 1790-1815” considers naval medicine as an interconnected system involving ships, hospital ships, and land-based hospitals. This research builds on…
Doctoral Completion Grants
Karissa Patton
Con(tra)ceptualizing care: Birth control centres, feminist models of healthcare, and reproductive politics in Southern Alberta, 1969-1979
Following the provincial implementation of medicare and the federal decriminalization of birth control in 1969, feminist birth control centres took up the provision of reproductive health services and education throughout the 1970s in the province of Alberta. Activists at these birth control centres created feminist models of healthcare and provided important health services locally and…
Making bodies, making kin: The history of medical illustrators in North America
As a female-dominated field, the invisibility of medical illustrators as knowledge creation agents contributes to the problematic perception of medical images as unfiltered representations of the scientific truth of bodies.
Kathryn Schweishelm
False faces: Examining the cultural history of cosmetic surgery
Cosmetic surgery, much like its effect on the bodies it transforms, is highly skilled at obscuring its age and origins. As an organized specialty, it is nearly a century old, and many of the procedures it employs are much older still, and yet cosmetic surgery somehow feels perpetually current and new, held up as an…
Oana Baboi
Healing the body to save the soul: Jesuit medicine in 17th century Asia
How to preserve and restore health while evangelizing overseas? Since its inception, one of the primary activities of the Society of Jesus was to send its members on evangelical missions to all corners of the world. As many Jesuits had difficulties adapting to the Asian climate and helplessly watched their bodies succumb to unfamiliar diseases, they…
Project Grantees
These grantees received small budget support for projects in history of healthcare/disease and medicine.
2019
How to save a life: Investigating gendering biomedical innovation
McGill University
“Illustrer le travail du coroner, du médecin légiste et de l’historien : défis et enjeux de l’histoire du geste suicidaire au Québec depuis 250 ans.”
University of Ottawa
Health and medicine in the Maritimes 1765-1830: Knowledge, networks, and practices in an age of revolution and loyalism
University of New Brunswick
Caring for the Commonwealth: Nurses, Doctors and the Colombo Plan of the 1950’s
University of New Brunswick
A short history of global/international health in the Americas: Canadian perspectives
University of Toronto
2018
Diversity of research traditions in the history of autism
University of Toronto
Life before medicare
Queen’s University
The history of the Hornby and Danman Community Health Care Society, 1978-2010
York University
2017
Creating a Centre for Science, Technology, Environment and Medicine Studies (C-STEMS) at the University of Calgary, AB
University of Calgary
The origins and uses of a verbal artifact in clinical medicine, 1920-2000
Ottawa Hospital Research Institute
Colonial extractions: Oral health, Indigenous Peoples and the federal government
University of Guelph
Childhood hand hygiene education and responsible motherhood in Canada, 1910-1979
Dalhousie University
Indigenous mental health workers and the challenges of cross-cultural psychiatry at the Sioux Lookout Zone Hospital, 1969-1996
Western University
2016
University of New Brunswick
Queen’s University
Brock University
University of Guelph
2015
Patient involvement in Canadian medical education: A historical study to inform the future
University of British Columbia
Mindfulness and emotionally healthy students in Canadian schools, 1960s to the present
St. Thomas University
Frances Oldham Kelsey, M.D., Ph. D.: From Cobble Hill to the F.D.A.
Vancouver Island University
From brains on the bench to images of mind? A critical appraisal.
University of Calgary
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