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
Kira Smith
Childhood madness: Compassionate portraits of children in Canadian insane asylums, 1880-1930
Childhood Madness is a digital exhibit about the experiences of children in Canadian asylums across five provinces. Kira’s project includes a map and timeline to develop a larger sense of time and the impact of colonialism. From there, viewers engage with province-based sections that include stories about institutionalized children. The goal of her project exhibit…
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.
Doctoral Research
Drew Danielle Belsky
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…
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Project Grantees
These grantees received small budget support for projects in history of healthcare/disease and medicine.
Jennifer Fraser and Whitney Wood
Hyperemesis histories: Patient and policy perspectives in twentieth and twenty-first century Canada
Hyperemesis gravidarum (HG) is a pregnancy complication characterized by severe nausea and vomiting that has wide-ranging effects on pregnant people. While historians of women’s health have written at length on pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood, the history of HG and broader nausea and vomiting during pregnancy (NVP) remains underexplored, especially in the Canadian context. With AMS…
Erich Weidenhammer and Elizabeth Neswald
Collecting the artificial body: Surveying the material culture of prosthetic artifacts
The twentieth century witnessed remarkable development within the field of prosthetics. This process occurred across many medical disciplines, producing a range of prostheses as dissimilar from each other as artificial organs, hearing assistive devices, and electrically controlled robot limbs. Erich and Elizabeth’s project addresses prosthetics as a singular topic using artifacts from the University of…
Kevin Siena
Disease, formativity, and the early science of heredity: Medical students debating race, 1785-1840
Kevin’s project explores public dissertations about race presented by Edinburgh medical students in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Two student organizations, the Royal Medical Society and the Royal Physical Society, held monthly salon-style meetings at which students, some of them classmates of a young Charles Darwin, tried their hands at Enlightenment-style debate. One…
Elizabeth Neswald and Erich Weidenhammer
Collecting the artificial body: Surveying the material culture of prosthetic artifacts
The twentieth century witnessed remarkable development within the field of prosthetics. This process occurred across many medical disciplines, producing a range of prostheses as dissimilar from each other as artificial organs, hearing assistive devices, and electrically controlled robot limbs. Erich and Elizabeth’s project addresses prosthetics as a singular topic using artifacts from the University of…
Andrea Tone
Dangerous beauty: The history and health hazards of the US cosmetics industry
Today, no country buys or sells more cosmetics than the United States. With annual sales exceeding 89 billion, the US beauty business is one of the most profitable in the world. It is also one of the least well-regulated. In 1938, years after doctors began warning of the rising tide of ‘poisonous’ beautifiers—face creams containing…
Catherine Carstairs
Juicy knowledge: User-generated information about steroids, 1970-2000s
In 1988, the world was shocked when the “fastest man in the world,” Ben Johnson, failed a drug test after his celebrated victory in the 100-meter dash at the Seoul Olympics. Subsequent inquiries in North America showed that performance-enhancing drug use was common throughout the sporting world. While the literature on doping in sport has…
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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