“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.

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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…

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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…

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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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