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 healthcare in education. Learn about their exceptional backgrounds and research interests.
Dr. Darrel Manitowabi
Post-Doctoral Fellows
Andrea Ens
‘Healing’ through harm: Examining affect in North American conversion therapies from 1910 to 2000
Andrea’s project examines Canadian and American patients’ and survivors’ lived experiences of the harmful practice of conversion therapy through the twentieth century. It asks how secular medical practitioners utilized and manipulated patients’ emotions as therapeutic tools in clinical contexts. Her analysis focuses on how practitioners in two different national contexts understood and responded to their…
Lucy Vorobej
“Volunteers Don’t Wear Price Tags”: Compensation Discourses and the Hospital Volunteer in 20th Century Health Care
The COVID-19 pandemic is only the most recent global health crisis to highlight that even those workers who are deemed to be “essential” to health care may not all receive compensation consistent with this proclaimed value. Within this vital workforce are those who receive no compensation at all, volunteers. Despite the inclusion of “hospital volunteer”…
Eric Story
The Great White Plague: Canada’s War on Tuberculosis, 1939–52
At the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, Canadian officials employed X-ray screening to ensure a healthy fighting force and, later, to decrease state liability for those who might have enlisted with pre-existing tuberculosis disease. Despite these preventative measures, the Canadian government discovered that members of the Canadian armed forces suffered far greater…
Matthew Barrett
Visualizing the Invisible Wound: Graphic Medicine and the History of War Trauma
Matthew’s project titled “Visualizing the Invisible Wound”examines the historical representations of war trauma using a methodology that combines graphic history and graphic medicine. As an historian and an artist, Matthew is interested in exploring graphic and illustrated storytelling as creative forms of historical interpretation and analysis.The idea of an invisible wound in contrast to a…
Jennifer Fraser
Epidemiology Ad Nauseum: Risk, Reasoning, and Hyperemesis Gravidarum
Jennifer’s project highlights the highly contingent nature of HG risk and draws attention to the specific science-society configurations that have impacted how women’s symptoms have been both understood and managed by Canadian healthcare professionals over time.
Stephen Pow
The Global Challenge of Cholera in the Nineteenth Century: Standard Narratives and New Perspectives on Societal Responses and Medical Notions
Stephen’s project brings together trends in public health, environmental, and Asian history, while strengthening new methodological insights and approaches. Based on historical research, the project highlights how globalization trends brought new challenges in containing cholera.
Doctoral Research
Daniel Arauz-Nunez
Numbing the pains of modernity: Sensory deprivation, and post-war psychology in Canada (1948-1974)
Daniel’s dissertation is an interdisciplinary history of how “numbness” came to be studied and disciplined to model the effects of modernity on the human body in Canada and the United States during the 20th century. Through studies of sensory deprivation, overstimulation, isolation, and addiction, this project traces how numbness became an object of scientific and…
Hannah Sparwasser-Soroka
Delivering the universal reformation: Letters, networks, and intellectual exchange in the Hartlib Circle, 1658-1662
Hannah’s project, “Delivering the Universal Reformation: Letters, Networks, and Intellectual Exchange in the Hartlib Circle, 1658–1662,” examines the final years of the Hartlib Circle, one of the seventeenth century’s largest intellectual networks. Historians have explained the group’s decline by pointing to political change, the increasing specialization of science and medicine, and changing religious ideas. Hannah’s…
Danielle Landry
‘In the business of changing lives’: Activist knowledge-practices and the founding of consumer/survivor businesses in southwest Ontario (1980-2005)
Danielle’s doctoral research draws on extensive interview (n=42) and archival data to consider the significance of collectively remembering, preserving and sharing mad people’s activist histories. The central question guiding her work is: What is the significance of the historical emergence of consumer/survivor businesses to the consumer/survivor/ex-patient movement? She explores that question by examining how in…
Matthew McLaughlin
When life loses its zest: The origins of self-help literature for mental health, 1918-1939
Matthew’s project examines the origin, evolution, and impact of self-help literature written by American mental health practitioners during the interwar period. It focuses on the work of three authors: the psychologist H. Addington Bruce, the psychiatrist Abraham Myerson, and the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Karl Menninger. These experts published multiple self-help books and articles that communicated…
Matthew Edwards
On the table, in the books: Conversion therapy in Canadian healthcare education, 1941-1991
On the Table, In the Books traces the place of “conversion therapy” (CT) in Canada’s medical education system during the mid-twentieth century. Medical professionals in North America historically framed non-conformity to cisgender/heterosexual behaviour as a health issue, legitimizing psychiatric and psychological attempts at “curing” 2S/LGBTQIA+ sexualities, genders and bodies across time. These treatments were not,…
Alex Myrick
Infrastructures of Canadian psychiatry under the Meyerian diaspora
Alex’s project examines the proliferation and impact of new reform ideas in psychiatry developed by the Johns Hopkins psychiatrist Adolf Meyer, and the spread of his ideas by trainees who adapted his reforms both inside and outside of psychiatry in Canada throughout the twentieth century in ways that are relevant today. Scholars still do not…
Project Grantees
These grantees received small budget support for projects in history of healthcare/disease and medicine.
Isabelle Perreault
Psychochirurgie et traitements de choc en psychiatrie: L’exemple du Canada francophone au cours de l’après-guerre
Isabelle’s project examines the practices and effects of somatic therapies in psychiatry during the postwar period, focusing on Saint-Jean-de-Dieu Hospital in Montreal between 1945 and 1960. This era was marked by the development of insulin treatments, electroconvulsive therapy, psychosurgery, and neuroleptics, reflecting the therapeutic ambitions of the medical specialty at the time. While these practices…
Amy Scott
Diarrheal disease and intestinal parasites in colonial Canada: Integrating history and bioarchaeology to study sanitation, infrastructure, and public Health
Characterized as a “foggy, desolate, deathtrap” the 18th c. Fortress of Louisbourg was a significant, yet treacherous colony in New France especially for unseen pathogens. Gastrointestinal illnesses have been present throughout history. Despite Louisbourg’s successes in New France, overcrowding, poor sanitation, and limited healthcare certainly contributed to diarrheal disease and widespread parasitic infections. The objectives…
Helen Vandenberg
The Lamont School of Nursing and Japanese Canadian nursing, 1925-1950
While most Canadian nursing schools upheld exclusionary admissions policies well into the mid-twentieth century, the Lamont Public Hospital School of Nursing in Alberta graduated at least 16 Japanese Canadian nurses between 1925 and 1950. Helen’s project examines how Lamont became a rare site of (at least partial) inclusion during a period of widespread institutional exclusion….
Thomas Schlich
The history of the Jewish quota at McGill University, 1920s-1960s
In the decades between 1920 and 1960, McGill University limited the admission of Jewish medical students through a quota system. This discriminatory measure has never been fully documented or contextualized. Thomas and his team’s project will fill this gap. They will identify the archival material that documents and discusses this policy, find printed sources, conduct…
Geoffrey Reaume
Collecting Canadian mad movement oral histories
Geoffrey’s project builds on Mad people’s history in Canada by collecting oral histories from key figures in the mad movement and supporting the development of an accessible Mad People’s History Archives. In collaboration with Efrat Gold and Anne McGuire, they are guided by the following questions: What are the implications of enriched discourses about Mad…
Mohamed Abdalla
The tides of trust: A diachronic analysis of trust and the social contract in Canadian health journals
Public trust in Canadian medical leaders and institutions has significantly declined, impacting vaccine uptake and public health crisis responses. Mohamed’s project will investigate how foundational concepts of the “clinician social contract,” such as trust, professionalism, and accountability, have evolved in Canadian and American medical literature from 1900-2025. Using large language model (LLM)-based tools, Mohamed’s team…
2020
Imperial pathways of mobility: doctoring women and the American surgical enterprise in Iran, 1888-1940
The University of British Columbia
History of vaccine resistance in Canada
University of Guelph
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
Exploring ethics and Canadian clinical cancer trials, 1978-1998
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
False faces: Examining the cultural history of cosmetic surgery
Healing the body to save the soul: Jesuit medicine in 17th century Asia
Manuscripting English medical knowledge in the early age of print
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
Exploring the history of natural childbirth in Canada and the world
2016
University of New Brunswick
Queen’s University
Brock University
University of Guelph
Canada’s health humanitarian work in South and Southeast Asia, 1950-1968.
Examining interwar veterans and healthcare in Alberta
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
Exploring LSD Psychotherapy in the United States, 1949-1976
Interpreting the genetic revolution
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Are you doing important work in this area? Have a timely idea that needs funding? Our grants and fellowships can support your projects and help you access valuable networks.
