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.
I also revamped the application process for awards, grants and scholarships 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."
I also worked as an investigative journalist and medical reporter. Some health and medical stories I wrote at the time are below:
Taking Medicine to the People: Four Innovators in Community Health
Take Two Big Doses of Humanity and Call Me in the Morning
The Hannah Institute for the History of Medicine was located at 14 Prince Arthur Avenue, Toronto, steps away from the University of Toronto campus.
The archive of newsletters is held at the Wellcome Collection Library in London, UK: http://0-www.bmj.com.libsys.wellcome.ac.uk/search~S7?/tNewsletter+%28Hannah+Institute+for+the+History+of+Medicine%29/tnewsletter+hannah+institute+for+the+history+of+medicine/-3%2C-1%2C0%2CB/frameset&FF=tnewsletter+hannah+institute+for+the+history+of+medicine&2%2C%2C2
From Evaluation of the Wellcome Trust History of Medicine Programme (April 2000).
Impact of work raising profile of medical history scholarship in Canada according to Abstracts in Anthropology, Volume 43:
Abstracts in Anthropology, Volume 43, Issues 3-4: "... in recent years it has become a pursuit for a growing number of researchers. ... Behind much of this growth has been the Hannah Institute for the History of Medicine which has encouraged writing ...".
© David South Consulting 2017