Each year the CSHM/SCHM invites a noted historian of medicine to present a lecture on their area of expertise at the conference. The list of presenters reflects current interests and concerns in medical and health history and also recognizes significant contributions to the field in Canada.
Begun in the early 1980s, the lecture was originally named after Dr. Jason Hannah, founder of Associated Medical Services Inc. and the Hannah Institute for the History of Medicine. In 1987, the Board of AMS decided to rename the lectureship in honour of Dr. G.R. “Pat” Paterson, the founding executive director of the Hannah Institute, on the occasion of his retirement from the position.
Since its inception, this important event has been generously funded by AMS Healthcare. Learn more about AMS Healthcare.
Past Paterson Lecturers
* These Paterson lectures have been published in the Canadian Journal of Health History / Revue canadienne d’histoire de la santé
2024 Ahmed Ragab, Johns Hopkins University, “A Memory of Medicine: History and the Making of a Global Medical Archive.”
2023 Sanjoy Bhattacharya, University of Leeds, “Ideas, Adaptive Implementation and Smallpox Eradication: Reorienting Notions of Value and Worth in Global Health.”
2022 Brenda Child, University of Minnesota, “Trauma and Healing: Remembering the Crises of 1918-1920 in Ojibwe Country.”
2021 Cindy Blackstock, McGill University, “Colonialism in 2021: Impacts for First Nations Children.”
2020 lecture cancelled due to the COVID-19 Pandemic
2019 Warwick Anderson, University of Sydney/Harvard University, “Planetary Health Histories | Histoires sur la santé planétaire.”
2018 Dorothy Porter, University of California San Francisco, “Tremor: A Biography of Parkinson’s Disease from the Shaking Palsy to the Neurobiology of Compulson.”
2017 Evelynn Hammonds, Harvard University, “‘The Physician’s Negro’: The Racialization Of American Medicine.”
2016 *Elena Conis, Emory University, “Vaccines, Pesticides, and the Nature of Evidence.”
2015 *Natalie Zemon Davis, Princeton University, “Physicians, Healers, and Their Remedies in Colonial Suriname.”
2014 Waltraud Ernst, Oxford Brookes University, “Mental Health and Illness in Princely India, c. 1860-1960.”
2013 Nayan Shah, University of Southern California, “Prison Hunger Strikes, Medical Ethics, and Globalizing the Anti-Apartheid Struggle.”
2012 Monica H. Green, Arizona State University, “The Medievalist and the Microbiologist: How Plague and Leprosy Have Opened Up New Perspectives on the History of Medicine.”
2011 Susan Lederer, University of Wisconsin, “Presuming Consent: Body (parts) Appropriation and the Body Politic in Atomic-Age America.”
2010 Jacques Bernier, Université Laval, “Medicine In Colonial Canada” / « La médecine et le Canada colonial »
2009 Angus McLaren, University of Victoria, “Divorcing Sex and Reproduction: The Discussion of Artificial Insemination in Britain, 1918-1948.”
2008 Charlotte Furth, University of Southern California, “Becoming Alternative? Chinese Medicine in the Modern World.”
2007 Heinrich von Staden, Princeton University, “The Physiology of Morals: Ancient Medical perspectives.”
2006 Gregg Mitman, University of Wisconsin, “Cockroaches, Housing and Race: A History of Asthma and Urban Ecology in America.”
2005 Ruth Schwartz Cowan, University of Pennsylvania. “The Historian as Bioethicist: Genetic Screening for Thalassemia on the Island of Cyprus.”
2004 Christopher Hamlin, University of Notre Dame, “Where Doctoring Begins and Ends: Dr W P Alison and the Problem of the Borders of Medicine.”
2003 Harold Cook, University College London, “Learning from Nature: Renaissance Botany and Medicine.”
2002 Bert Hansen, City University of New York, “Has the Laboratory been a Closet? Gay and Lesbian Lives in the History of Science and Medicine.”
2001 Anne-Marie Moulin, Paris, “The King’s Physician: historical figures; scientific model” / « Le Médecin du prince: figures historiques; modèle scientifique. »
2000 Andrew R. Cunningham, Wellcome Institute, ‘The End of the Sacred Ritual of Anatomy.”
1999 *Charles G. Roland
1998 Susan Reverby
1997 Gerald Geison
1996 Barbara Rosenkrantz
1995 François Delaporte
1994 Susan Cayleff
1993 Philip Teigen
1992 *Jackie Pigeaud
1991 John Harley Warner
1990 Judith Walzer Leavitt
1989 *Jean-Noël Biraben
1988 Guenter B. Risse
1987 *John Parascandola