medical museum – David South Consulting

Artifacts also abound at the University of Western Ontario

Medical history students should consider a trip to the Department of History of Medicine at the University of Western Ontario to see another unique collection of artifacts and documents from Canada’s medical past.

Once located in London’s University Hospital, the artifacts are now technically on loan to the university. Hannah Professor Paul Potter recently assumed responsibility for the collection when University Hospital closed the museum.

“The collection has been created over the ages,” says Professor Potter. “The museum started at University Hospital when it was built in the early 1970s. Two rooms were set aside at the hospital for a medical museum – one room was a re-creation of a nineteenth-century doctor’s office with numerous instruments.”

The actual doctor’s office was packed off to the local pioneer village.

“We took the medical instruments and doctors’ ledgers. I took the things that were more interesting from a medical history perspective.”

And what’s there to see? For shock value there are the gruesome instruments of Victorian medicine – bloodletting knives and cups and surgical saws. Also on display is London’s first electro-cardiogram machine and microscopes dating back to the mid-1800s.

For Professor Potter, the collection livens up medical school lectures and provides a valuable research resource at the university.

© David South Consulting 2022

Hannah Institute For The History Of Medicine | 1992 – 1994

Publisher: Hannah Institute for the History of Medicine

Location: Toronto, Canada

Editor and Writer: David South

I worked as Editor and Writer for the newsletter of the Hannah Institute for the History of Medicine (under the direction of the Editor-in-Chief and Hannah Executive Director Dr. J.T. H. Connor) in the early 1990s. Located close to the University of Toronto and within a neighbourhood claiming a long association with medical and scientific discovery (Sir Frederick Banting, co-developer of insulin for the treatment of diabetes, lived at 46 Bedford Road,), the goal was to better connect Canada’s medical history community of scholars and raise the profile of the funding resources available to further the study of medical history in Canada.

The Toronto Legacy Project and Heritage Toronto plaque marking the location of Sir Frederick Banting’s former home.

I also revamped the application process for awards, scholarships and grants to make them user-friendly and compatible with word processing software packages of the time.

The Hannah Institute was the adminstrator for the grants and awards funded by AMS (Associated Medical Services). It has had a profound impact on the medical history field in Canada, as the AMS website states:

“As a result of the growth of the discipline and the burgeoning of scholarship, as well as financial support from other funding bodies, in 2006, the AMS Board of Directors decided not to provide new competitive grants and further, decided to bring AMS- administered competitive grants to closure by 2011.

In the 1970’s when the Hannah Chairs and the Hannah Institute were established, the discipline of the history of medicine was an “orphan’ within the Canadian scholarly community. Three decades later with the support of AMS, history of medicine and healthcare continued to thrive in universities and colleges across Canada.”

It funded groundbreaking medical history research and scholarship, including books such as Eugenics, Human Genetics and Human Failings: The Eugenics Society, its sources and its critics in Britain By Pauline Mazumdar, Copyright Year 1992.