“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.

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Weapons of mass pollution: health and environmental hazards in Canada’s munitions industry during the Second World War

This project sits at the intersection of medical, environmental, and military history. It will teach us about the history of toxicity and risk prevention related to workplace safety, medical treatments, and decontamination methods in the 1940s.  During the Second World War, Canadian industries produced about 4.4 billion rounds of ammunition, 72 million artillery shells, and…

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Manuscripting English medical knowledge in the early age of print

My postdoctoral research focuses on how individuals, and especially medical practitioners, adapted and personalised printed medical treatises by copying these often long (and sometimes learned) texts into manuscript in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. To understand the production and use of medical knowledge in the early modern era, we must consider manuscripts and printed texts…

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The histories of military funding and medical science in Cold War Canada

Matthew called his AMS project, “Cold Soldiers: Medical Scientist Alan C. Burton and Military Experimentation in Cold War Canada”. It examined Burton’s postwar research contributions to military science in Canada. His work for the Defence Research Board is important for medical historians because it shows the entangled histories of military funding and medical science in…

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Exploring the history of natural childbirth in Canada and the world

As an AMS Postdoctoral Fellow, Whitney continued the research for her second book manuscript, tentatively titled “A New Way to Birth? Natural Childbirth in Canada and the World, 1930-2000”. She also began an oral history project to explores attitudes towards natural childbirth in twentieth century Canada.

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