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
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.
Cynthia Tang
“A Short Cut to Better Services”: A History of Day Surgery and Post-Operative Patient Care in the British National Health Service, c. 1950-2000
This project will reconstruct the history of day/outpatient surgery in Britain and consider its adoption in the context of the 1990s National Health Service reforms. As Canadian healthcare increasingly transitions to the use of outpatient approaches as a strategy for decreasing long surgical wait times, a better understanding of their adoption and outcomes in other healthcare systems will be instructive.
Doctoral Completion Grants
Lucy Vorobej
“By Their Own Efforts”: First Nations Health Policy in Canada, 1945-1980
Lucy’s project examines the development and implementation of First Nations health policy during Canada’s post-war period of integration. It analyzes how the idea of race and the objectives of settler colonialism impacted debates about jurisdiction, affected the nature of health services offered to First Nations peoples, and limited the creation of meaningful partnerships with First Nations leaders.
Martin Beaulieu
The therapeutic use of cinema to treat mentally ill patients (1895-1950)
Martin Beaulieu examines the therapeutic use of cinema by the mental health professions, trying to understand why and how the cinema was considered a therapeutic tool to treat mental disorders.
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…
Project Grantees
These grantees received small budget support for projects in history of healthcare/disease and medicine.
Efrat Gold
Archiving Patient-Led Mad Activism in Canada, 1970s-2020
Efrat’s project is designed in two segments. The first segment involves the curation of mad-centered archival material not yet available in the public domain. The second is an original research segment, using critical discourse analysis of the archival material, that seeks to enhance understandings of the crucial and active role of mental patients in shaping…
Esyllt Jones
Historian Engagement in Public Health
During the COVID-19 pandemic, disease and health historians have frequently been called upon by media, public organizations, and institutions (including government agencies) to explain how past disease outbreaks can inform present-day and future responses, and to enhance public understanding. They have provided insight into public health measures (including social distancing, or self-isolation), mental health, vaccine…
Heather Stanley
Maternal Darkness: Postpartum Depression and Maternal Mental Illness in Western Canada, 1890-1980
Heather’s project explores the history of postpartum depression and related maternal mental illnesses in Canada from 1890-1980. Despite media sensations created by famous cases of mentally ill mothers there are almost no historical examinations of maternal mental illness in North America. Historically, maternal mental illnesses sit on an uneasy axis between society’s high social expectations…
Courtney Mrazek
Women Helping Women: Inuit and Innu Women and Participatory Health Workshops in Labrador in the 1980s
Courtney’s project will examine how health workshops led by women for women in Labrador in the 1980s affected Inuit and Innu women. These workshops employed a unique participatory approach that reinforced lived experiences and reciprocity, and recognized that women held expertise about their bodies, and their families’ and communities’ health concerns and needs. Using the…
Kyle Derkson
The Making of a Spiritual Contraption: Séances, Psychiatry, Prisons, and Schools, 1830-1930
Kyle’s research interrogates the connections between religion, psychiatry, prison, and educational institutions in nineteenth-century Canada, framing their relationship as conspiracy. He defines conspiracy as the means through which these institutions withheld or produced knowledge to maintain and legitimize their positions of influence. Using framework of co-conspirators demonstrates the intention of these institutions in creating and…
Kristin Burnett
The Work of the Hamilton Branch of the YWCA in Indian Hospitals, Sanatoria, and Residential Schools
During the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, women’s philanthropic organizations made financial and in-kind contributions to Indian hospitals, sanatoria, and residential schools. Records from the Department of Indian Affairs and churches describe the arrival of clothing, bedding, medicine, and toys from women’s organizations. For large voluntary organizations, these contributions went further to include running educational…
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
A system of care and control: British naval medicine 1790-1815
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.