Compassion beyond the screen: Dr. Laura Desveaux’s research shows how compassionate health care can thrive in virtual care

Ontario’s health care system experienced a seismic shift in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Technology-based primary care visits soared 56-fold while in-person visits dropped by nearly 80%. Amid the rapid pivot to virtual care and the near immediate decline in social connectivity, a pressing question emerged: can compassionate care translate through a screen? After…

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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…

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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…

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“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…

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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…

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‘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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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