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
Jessica Sealey
Curating the anatomical sciences: Historical perspectives and contemporary concerns in the Queen’s University anatomy lab and museum
As one of the oldest faculties of medicine in Canada, Queen’s University has a rich history of medical research and education. Today, the university possesses a state-of-the-art anatomical laboratory for the dissection of human cadavers received through their Human Body Donor Program. Adjacent to the lab is the university’s collection of wet specimens and skeletal…
Jody Hodgins
Magic bullet or threat to humanity: Antibiotic use and antimicrobial resistance in animal agriculture in Canada, 1940-1990
With the widespread adoption of antibiotics after the 1940s, farmers, veterinarians, and industry leaders came to rely on antimicrobials as a cost-effective way to fight disease and promote growth in livestock. Though specialists were aware that antibiotics could have a long-term influence on antimicrobial resistance (AMR), little was done to prevent AMR from becoming one…
Derek Cameron
Experiences of the children of anti-vaccine activists in Canada, 1982-2004
This project explores the impact of anti-vaccine activism on activists’ children, c.1982-2004. Derek’s doctoral research on late twentieth-century Canadian anti-vaccine activism revealed a surprising fact: a number of anti-vaccine activists’ now-adult children had chosen to receive vaccinations in adulthood. By interviewing the adult children of anti-vaccine activists, Derek aims to understand how they adopted or resisted parental beliefs…
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”…
Doctoral Research
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…
Fiona L. Kenney
“More to the design than just architecture”: Practices, philosophies, and architectures of care, 1960-1995
The architectures of long-term and palliative care have resisted related typologies, like hospitals, in the same way that the hospice philosophy resists the medical desire to cure. Fiona’s dissertation explores what care, as an evolving concept, has looked like to architects in North America and the UK since the 1960’s. It considers how architecture has…
Vincent Auffrey
The history of eugenics in French Canada, 1880s-1940s
In the early 20th century, eugenics—a science concerned primarily with the “improvement of the human race” by means of selective breeding—rose to prominence in nearly every country across the globe and left a profound impact on science and society. Eugenicists theorized that many social problems could be fixed by encouraging “fit” individuals to marry and…
Emily B. Kaliel
Colonial landscapes: Public health programming, health districts, and nutrition education in Alberta, 1920s – 1960s
Emily’s dissertation studies the creation and expansion of public health programming with a focus on nutrition in Alberta from the 1920s to the 1960s, primarily in rural and northern areas. In the Prairies, where concerns of land dominated provincial concerns, public health, food, and nutrition were inextricably connected with the land. The discovery of macro-…
Jody Hodgins
Meeting Demands for Animal Healthcare: Veterinary Medicine in Rural Southern Ontario, 1862-1939
Before veterinarians populated the countryside, people had limited access to health knowledge and relied on experienced neighbours or medical doctors to practice animal healthcare. Jody’s dissertation examines the interdependence between animal, human, and environmental health to show advancements in public health and the role veterinary medicine had in shaping our current understanding of modern medicine…
Erin Gallagher-Cohoon
Queerly Familial: Canadian Histories of Queer Reproduction, Parenting, and Activism
Erin’s dissertation analyzes Canadian histories of queer parenting and queer family formations in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Drawing from psychological, legal, media, policy and oral history sources, my research questions sociocultural constructions of the categories of “family” and “parenthood.” This dissertation sits at the intersection between histories of medicine, histories of sexuality, and…
Project Grantees
These grantees received small budget support for projects in history of healthcare/disease and medicine.
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…
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…
2020
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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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