For the 30th anniversary of Black History Month, the theme  is “Honouring Black Brilliance Across Generations – From Nation Builders to Tomorrow’s Visionaries.” The Canadian Museum of Health Care will be continuing our series of profiles on Black individuals’ and organizations’ contributions to healthcare by highlighting the work of Dr. Dominique Gaspard.

For the 30th anniversary of Black History Month, the theme  is “Honouring Black Brilliance Across Generations – From Nation Builders to Tomorrow’s Visionaries.” The Canadian Museum of Health Care will be continuing our series of profiles on Black individuals’ and organizations’ contributions to healthcare by discussing the work of the Black Cross Nurses.

For the 30th anniversary of Black History Month, the theme  is “Honouring Black Brilliance Across Generations – From Nation Builders to Tomorrow’s Visionaries.” The Canadian Museum of Health Care will be highlighting the Black individuals’ and organizations’ contributions to healthcare both locally and globally, starting with Dr. James Still.

Nearly every culture that has snakes or snake-like creatures in their region has some sort of snake mythology. Snakes are viewed as dualistic in nature, representing both aspects of good (healing, fertility, wisdom, rebirth) and evil (death, poison, trickery, harming). To understand snakes further, let's examine their life and death properties.

A Leclerc Jano loom provided the inspiration for my Margaret Angus Fellowship research about the history of occupational therapy. The loom almost seems out of place amongst the pill bottles, doctors’ kits, and nurses’ uniforms that surround it in the museum’s storage room (Figure 1). Objects in the MHC’s collections often bear the imprint of the doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals who touched and used the equipment, but only infrequently bear the traces of the patients that these objects served.

Two names have repeatedly come up in the research for my Margaret Angus fellowship project about occupational therapy in Canada: Mary Alice Peck and Mary Black. While my previous blog posts have focused on major historical periods in the development of occupational therapy in Canada (the asylum reform movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the World Wars), this post focuses on these two influential women. Peck and Black were both significant figures in the development of occupational therapy in Canada, although they epitomize different aspects of women’s roles in the field.