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.