Ex crypta: The Curator's Blog

The Curator's Blog is evolving

2011-08-04T07:25:00.000-07:00

To accommodate the increasing number of diverse blog posts by museum staff and volunteers, Ex crypta: The Curator's blog has evolved into the Museum of Health Care Blog, which can be found at http://museumofhealthcare.wordpress.com/.

All new posts, as well as the Ex crypta archives, can be found on the Museum of Health Care Blog.

Thank you for your Patronage to our Hall of Honour Exhibits at Kingston General Hospital

2011-06-14T13:16:00.000-07:00

Curatorial Assistant Erin Manning (L) and
Collections Intern Tanya Szulga (R)

Curator's Blog guest post written by Collections Intern Tanya Szulga:

Over the past twenty years the Museum of Health Care has created exhibits for the Kingston General Hospital’s Hall of Honour. Recently KGH staff is working on a new redesign of this area and as part of that design process asked the museum to remove the exhibits for construction and carpet removal due to begin in July 2011.

To facilitate the dismantling of the four current exhibits, two museum studies students were engaged to lead the multi-faceted process of returning the items to the museum and loaned items, cleaning and preparing for storage all objects. Tanya Szulga, Collections Intern from Fleming College and Erin Manning, Collections Technician from Algonquin College were the perfect choice to ensure the safety and long term condition of the various items on exhibit.

Dismantling an on-site exhibit and the multiple stages of preparation and activity required for one exhibit is intense but this project involved four exhibits located off-site. Logistics and lots of preparation were required. The following provides a glimpse at what it takes to take down an exhibit following museum standards.

Dismantling the exhibits on display in the Kingston General Hospital’s Hall of Honour began weeks before the actual removal process commenced. Tanya Szulga prepared detailed exhibit artefact lists, storage location charts and supply lists to ensure that all objects would be properly transported back to the museum, had ‘homes’ in the storage areas to return to, and to ensure that the information on the database would be up-to-date and complete with pictures of all items by the end of the process. She also created a step-by-step guide to prepare for the removal process and make the days of dismantling as smooth and problem-free as possible.

Thursday, June 2nd 2011 was a perfect summer day with sunny weather forecast a great start to begin the dismantling and transportation of the first group of exhibits to be dismantled. Tanya and Erin began dismantling the “White Plaque: Fighting TB” and “Beyond Ether: Anesthesia” exhibits. The last exhibit “KGH Auxiliary” had the most quantity of items and was completed the next day.

The process of opening the cases, safely removing the artefacts, and cleaning up the cases had its ups and downs. Erin and Tanya had planned ahead and prepared a concise process, but even the best laid plans can hit minor bumps along the way. Some artefacts had been on display for a long time and required very careful treatment while moving and transporting to the museum next door. The suction / insufflation machine in the anesthesia exhibit particular has c1930s rubber tubing that is extremely fragile. All the artefacts on display have been safely moved back to the museum and are currently “resting”. Objects that were loaned for the exhibit are currently being prepared for return to their rightful owners. Objects without photographs will be taken and added to the on-line database soon so the items you remember from this exhibit will be viewable through our website http://www.museumofhealthcare.ca/research-and-collections/.

Throughout the process the pair was constantly stopped by hospital staff and visitors wishing to express how pleased they were over the years to see the items on exhibit, and now saddened to hear the new exhibits will not be returning for a possible one to two years. They expressed hope that the Kingston General Hospital could decide on the redesign of the Hall of Honour soon and allow the Museum of Health Care staff to re-install new exhibits in the future. Tanya and Erin reminded all these people that while the Hall of Honour exhibits are now gone, the Museum, located next door to Kingston General Hospital is open Tuesday to Sunday starting 18 June from 10-4 pm, and the numerous exhibits on the main level at the museum show a variety of interesting aspects of medical history. We even have a large display on the history of nurse’s uniforms and a restored nursing residence bedroom. The new Children’s Gallery has a very colourful wall mural that everyone enjoys.

An era comes to a close with the removal of this group of four exhibits and museum staff eagerly wait for the nod from KGH staff that the new design of the exhibit cases meet museum standards and new medical history topics can be researched, items selected and installed for the viewing public.

Tanya Szulga, Collections Intern

Interview with Former Curator Paul Robertson

2011-06-14T11:44:00.000-07:00

As mentioned at the bottom of the previous blog post, after seven years with the Museum of Health Care, former Curator Paul Robertson has decided to move on. The Museum of Health Care thanks Paul for his many years of innovative, exciting curatorial work and wishes him all the best in his new position.

Before his departure, we conducted a mini interview with Paul. Here are Paul's answers:

Why did you become a curator? from MuseumOfHealthCare on Vimeo.

What's a day in the life of a curator like? from MuseumOfHealthCare on Vimeo.

How did you become a curator? from MuseumOfHealthCare on Vimeo.

We are pleased to announce that we will be featuring some guest posts from other members of our curatorial staff this summer, so please stay tuned!

Artificial Placenta Project

2011-05-19T08:13:00.000-07:00

Mr. Jean Fortin

The Museum of Health Care receives a wide variety of gift offers over the course of a year, ranging from surgical instruments and nursing notebooks, to diagnostic equipment and healthcare-themed games and toys. Many of these donations relate to healthcare themes more generally, but in special cases, some document the careers of individual practitioners.

Such is the case with a donation the Museum received in 2010 from Mr. Jean Fortin, a retired marketing specialist in biomedical products. Mr. Fortin’s story intrigued me when he first contacted the Museum. He wanted to offer us a small collection of papers documenting his role in the early 1960s in the development of an artificial placenta at the University of Alberta. This project was led by Dr. John C. Callaghan, a cardiac surgeon at the university hospital noted for setting up the its open heart surgery unit in 1956 and performing the first successful cardiac operations in Canada using the heart-lung pump. He had previously worked in Toronto in the early 1950s with Dr. W.G. Bigelow to develop a first-generation intravenous pacemaker, an ancestor of modern day pacing.

I found Mr. Fortin’s role in this work interesting because he was one of the technicians involved in the artificial placenta project, an occupation often underreported in historical documentation of scientific and medical advances. Born in Quebec and originally trained in the 1950s as a Royal Canadian Navy electronic technician, Mr. Fortin joined Dr. Callaghan’s team at the University of Alberta research laboratories in 1962. By 1964, he was responsible for maintaining all of the electronic equipment for the artificial placenta project.

The placenta machine was designed to nurture a lamb removed by caesarean section from its mother. Before it could breathe on its own, it was placed in a plastic temperature-controlled bowl or artificial womb filled with a solution of sugar and salts replicating amniotic fluid. The lamb could be kept alive with a newly developed heart-lung machine that performed the oxygenating function of the placenta, the organ through which all unborn mammals receive oxygen and food from their mothers. Because they have similar physiological needs to human babies, lambs were often used during this period as stand-ins for humans in experiments.

The experiment’s main purpose was to devise ways to improve heart-lung machines that had already become standard in many hospitals. Although essential equipment for surgeons performing open heart surgery, existing heart-lung machines tended to damage blood cells after five or six hours of continuous use and therefore were used mainly for surgery and never as a life-saving aid for a baby born prematurely. Dr. Callaghan’s intention was to perfect a heart-lung machine that oxygenated blood so gently that premature babies with lung ailments could be kept alive until they were able to breathe on their own.

Mr. Fortin’s responsibilities including tending a flock of 200 ewes and one ram to provide the project with lambs, but more significantly, he was the technician who developed the artificial lung component of the artificial placenta unit. As he explained to me, that portion of the machine was missing until 1964 when he managed to adapt an artificial kidney design to act as a ‘lung’ oxygenator.

Image source: Life Magazine

In the experiment, the artificial placenta supplied oxygen to the lambs that were used to simulate premature human babies born with respiratory trouble. The machine consisted of five Lucite-walled chambers stacked on top of each other. The lamb was placed in the fluid-filled plastic bubble artificial womb. Tubes connected an artery and vein in the lamb’s umbilical cord with the chambers of the artificial placenta. Each chamber was 76 by 30 centimetres, but less than a millimetre thick. The machine was subdivided by two porous membranes into three thin layers. The oxygenator bubbled oxygen directly into a donor ewe’s blood which then flowed through the outer layers in each Lucite chamber. The lamb’s blood passed through a central layer, sandwiched between two layers of the oxygen-rich ewe’s blood. The two blood systems didn’t mix together, but the oxygen diffused through a few molecules at a time through the minute pores of the membranes into the lamb’s blood. At the same time, the carbon dioxide in the lamb’s blood was removed. With a gravity feed, the oxygenated blood was returned to the lamb in the artificial womb.

In August 1964 the research team had its first successful experiment when one lamb survived for 21 hours in the machine and lived when it was removed. Mr. Fortin reports this lamb was named John Glenn after the first American astronaut to orbit the earth. The project received national coverage in that month’s edition of Life magazine (which also featured a cover story on the Beatles).

Mr. Fortin later became a regular member of the university hospital’s cardiac perfusion team running the heart-lung pump during open heart surgeries. By 1966 he had assisted in 500 operations. He told me of one dramatic incident during an open heart operation when the pump that provided the oxygenated arterial blood seized five minutes into the operation. Mr. Fortin was called out to operate the machine manually by turning a crank for 90 minutes until the surgery was completed. The patient survived.

Mr. Fortin later left the university to go into sales of cardiac monitoring equipment. He retired in 2005. We are grateful to Mr. Fortin for bringing this personal story of health care history in Canada to the Museum.

Paul Robertson

Note: After seven years with the Museum of Health Care Paul Robertson has decided to move on. The Museum of Health Care thanks Paul for his many years of innovative, exciting curatorial work and wishes him all the best in his new position. Although this will be Paul’s final blog post for Ex Crypta, the blog may continue in the future… stay tuned!

Fenwick Operating Theatre: a life-saving surgery in Edwardian Kingston

2010-09-23T10:17:00.000-07:00

Bennie Stalker two weeks after surgery,
October 1901, Source: Jim Bremner

Bennie S., age 10, on the 17th of September last was accidentally shot by his brother, a lad about two years his senior . . . The arm was nearly severed from the body . . . The patient’s father ascribes the arrest of the hemorrhage to the fact that there was an old man at the house who had a “charm” for stopping bleeding . . . A doctor was procured who came a distance of twenty-two miles and remained at the house for two days, relieved his suffering and applied dressings of carbolic oil to the wound. The arm speedily became gangrenous and the little sufferer was evidently not expected to survive . . . “seventeen days” after the receipt of the injury he was started on his long journey to the Kingston general hospital. Leaving his home at six in the morning lying on a mattress in a spring waggon he reached Calabogie station on the K&P railroad at noon and arrived at the hospital about 5 p.m.

These events occurred in eastern Ontario in September - October 1901. This account reveals much about the stark realities of rural Canadian health care a century ago, but at the same time, the amazing ability of the human body to survive severe trauma and the abiding human desire to care for the sick.

At the heart of the story is young William Benjamin Stalker, who was born in 1891 and lived on a farm near Plevna. The clinical details of his misadventure and life-saving surgery are preserved in the surgeon’s report detailing the boy’s accident and medical treatment in the January 1902 Kingston Medical Quarterly. For historians, Dr. W.G. Anglin’s case study puts a human face to the ancient hospital spaces and dry administrative reports that remain as historical evidence today.

After Bennie’s all-day journey to Kingston General Hospital, he was admitted to the St. Andrew’s Ward for children in the upper storey of the Watkins Wing. Dr. Anglin describes in detail the severity of the boy’s wounds and the extreme deterioration of his arm and upper extremity. The next day we learn that Bennie was wheeled into the recently constructed Fenwick Operating Theatre. Complete amputation was the only option if the boy was to survive – grim, but effective treatment. News reports of the emergency amputations required to save lives of victims of the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti spring to mind.

Gigli saw for cutting bone, MHC Collection 1976.6.37

In his account, Dr. Anglin references an array of instruments and medications now found at the Museum (Gigli saw, aneurysm needle, pressure forceps, chloroform, hypodermic, strychnine, digitalis). To a curator, these real-life references add invaluable context and relevance to our collections.

The doctor’s description of Bennie’s aftercare says much about social services of the day: “Our readers may be interested to know that having but one parent living, the little fellow has been admitted into that excellent institution the Orphans’ Home in this city.”

Dr. Anglin recorded that Bennie was an interesting patient and always quick and bright with his answers. He recounted the boy’s encounter with Dr. Alan Manby, the physician accompanying the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York (King George V and Queen Mary) while on their 1901 cross-Canada tour. During a visit to KGH Dr. Manby told Bennie that he would be unable to visit him again because of the great distance the doctor had come to be there. Bennie’s quick and unexpected response is reported to be, “”Well, I came nearly a hundred miles myself to get here.” How medical journal articles have changed.

After his amazing recovery, Bennie grew up to have a full and productive life, first as a travelling ventriloquist and later an itinerant photographer. He married and had five children. After Bennie’s death in 1940, his wife remarried and had a son named Jim Bremner. I thank Mr. Bremner and his wife Marianne who spent ten years researching Bennie’s fascinating story for bringing it to our attention. This is what helps to make history real and bring museum collections to life.

Paul Robertson
Curator

Funding Success for Museum Collection

2010-04-20T07:13:00.000-07:00

Iron lung, built at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, 1937,
MHC Collection 997.019.003

We are excited to announce that Ontario’s Museums and Technology Fund has granted $15,000 to the Museum of Health Care for the development of a new feature on our website entitled “From the Collection”. To be developed over the next year, this page will include a series of short illustrated profiles for various objects, images, and documents drawn from the MHC collections. The subjects of these profiles will include artefacts, drawings, books, documents, works of art, and photographs representing various collections, themes, historical events, persons, medical disciplines, curiosities, and “treasures” currently held in MHC artefact and archival holdings.

Although most of this material is currently available for viewing on our publicly accessible online collections catalogue, we know that many of our most intriguing items are largely hidden from the average visitor to the Museum’s website, particularly from people who may not feel comfortable navigating a database. Another disadvantage is that the artefacts in the catalogue are not searchable from outside the website. It will now be possible to search for objects featured in the new artefact profiles with Google and other external search engines.

Enema Syringe, circa 1800, MHC Collection 002.050.006 a-d

Another goal of “From the Collection” is an “added value” component for each object. For each artefact and image profiled, we want to provide a more complete interpretation of what those items are and how they fit into broader themes. The new artefact profiles will also provide links to other similar objects in the collection, thus making searching on a health care subject even easier than before.

We want to involve the public more with our collection. “From the Collection” will include a link to a newly created online forum included with each profile. In this way we hope to provide an opportunity for user-generated content through community contribution, discussion, and interaction.

Watch this site for further information as the project gets under way!

Paul Robertson
Curator

Early Penicillin Sample Comes to Collection

2010-02-19T12:24:00.000-08:00

Curators are always excited when they make a “find”, especially when that find more or less just arrives at our doorstep: an ampoule containing some of the first experimental penicillin produced in Canada!

Ampoule of penicillin, MHC Collection

How did it come to the Museum of Health Care? In the late 1990s the Museum received a transfer of artefacts and archival documents from Queen’s University (Kingston, Canada), known as the Faculty of Medicine Collection. Most of the objects were shifted to the Museum at that time, but a few remained on display in the medical school on campus. Recently it was decided to move the remaining pieces to the Museum for processing and preservation. Among the Victorian surgeon’s kits, textbooks, and medical student graduation programmes was a nine centimetre glass vial holding a white powder and a typewritten file card:

“The last of twelve ampoules containing the first batch of PENICILLIN (10,000 units) made experimentally by Ayerst, McKenna, Harrison of Montreal. The untried, unproved drug was used successfully (but unofficially) to save the life of a 16 year old boy, critically ill with septicemia following a ruptured appendix in the summer of 1940.”

According to the card, the sample was given to Queen’s by one of its grads, Dr. C.W. Kelley (1928), former chief of surgery, Ottawa Civic Hospital.

The anti-bacterial function of penicillin was first discovered in 1928 by English bacteriologist Alexander Fleming, but its clinical potential was not realised until 1940 when pathologist Howard Florey and biochemist Ernst Chain were able to extract, purify, and produce the drug in their laboratory. This short video explains the discovery of penicillin:

Watch Penicillin at EncycloMedia.com

What makes our penicillin sample particularly rare is that the isolation of the antibiotic’s active ingredient in England appears to have taken place only a short while before this ampoule was produced. Founded in 1925, Ayerst, McKenna and Harrison was a young Canadian pharmaceutical firm – in 1931 it set up the first commercial biological laboratory in the country. Penicillin was still an experimental drug and clearly its use on a teenager in 1940 was a gamble, but fortunately one with a happy outcome, given how unauthorised was its administration.

During the Second World War pharmaceutical companies in several countries rushed to produce penicillin for soldiers – the antibiotic’s ability to greatly reduce mortality rates resulting from infected wounds, unclean surgery, and infectious diseases was a clear advantage on the battlefield. The war galvanised the mass production of many drugs and penicillin became available on a wide scale to the general public between 1944 and 1946. This 20th –century “magic bullet” has long been an effective weapon against pneumonia, anthrax, tetanus, syphilis, and diphtheria. The little penicillin ampoule buried in a university exhibit showcase – what has turned out to be an important treasure highlighting a significant development in Canadian healthcare history.

Paul Robertson
Curator

The Book of a Life

2010-02-09T09:27:00.000-08:00

MHC Collection

While doing a long overdue sorting and clean-up of the Museum’s small research library recently, I came across a fascinating little publication entitled The Book of a Life, From Generation to Generation by James C. Connell, M.D., published in 1935 by the Ryerson Press. This slim volume is a form of medical diary, where an individual writes down his or her health history from birth until old age (presumably, the book would be started by the parent!). It’s sort of the “full life” version of those baby books where parents record their child’s early development and paste in photos and locks of hair.

Dr. J.C. Connell, portrait by Kenneth Forbes, Queen's University collection

The author was once an influential player in medical circles here in Kingston where the Museum is located. Dr. Connell (1863-1947) was long a prominent figure in medicine, education, and administration at Queen’s University and at Kingston General Hospital. A Queen’s graduate and an early specialist in surgery of the eye, ear, nose, and throat, in 1891 he was appointed the first director of the university’s ophthalmology department and later wrote a textbook on the subject that was used by students for many years. Dean of the faculty of medicine from 1903-1929, Dr. Connell was instrumental in improving the profile and quality of medical education at the university and departmental and clinical expansion at the hospital. He was also briefly the principal of Queen’s. In retirement, he produced The Book of a Life, no doubt fueled by his decades of medical experience and his personal criteria for wise and healthy living.

Dr. Connell’s goals for his little book were clear: he wanted a means to document an individual’s complete personal record, more than the usual birth, marriage, and death information collected by the state. His vision was a volume that captured someone’s ancestry, physical characteristics and development, mental growth, education, attainments, ailments and accidents, and important incidents of life. Dr. Connell designed his book as a way to educate the public on the value of personal record keeping and to expose them to information about standards of healthy living. Coupled with this, he saw it as a useful summary record for the family physician who he recommended should examine the diary periodically and “write out the result and the admonition or advice he thinks necessary to assist development, to ward off unhealthy tendencies and, later on, to prevent the many disorders and diseases of advancing life.” Foreshadowing our modern permanent electronic integrated health record perhaps? It also gives patients a real role in their own health care.

MHC Collection

Interspersed between the pages recording the details of an individual’s health and wellbeing over the course of a lifetime, The Book of a Life contains helpful information about the body and its functions and advice on healthy living, the sort of stuff one expects to find in a guide for parents or other health service pamphlets. A wide assortment of topics cover such subjects as average growth rates in children, hygiene, healthy eating, the value of sleep, recommended body weights, details of common diseases, the desired frequency of regular physical examinations, and mental health.

What I found interesting but a little eerie were the life expectancy statistics and rates of mortality included at the top of each diary entry for a particular age. Even on the page where the book’s owner writes down particulars of his birth and parentage Dr. Connell notes “Expectancy of life is 65 years at the time of birth, if advantage is take of all the benefits of modern medicine. Without these it may be only 47 years.” This statement is revealing: it shows the change in the average lifespan from 1935 to our own time (80.4 years) but also describes an era where living standards for many Canadians were lower and professional health care was often infrequent or unavailable. Clearly, the introduction of universal Medicare has had a major impact on the lives of Canadians.

I was excited to see that our copy of The Book of a Life has been filled in by its former owner, a woman born in the Kingston area in 1896 who had received it as a gift from Dr. Connell himself. True to the doctor’s design, reading the pages of the diary I can pull together a reasonably good picture of the diarist, her health, her career, her activities and achievements, her family history, and some of her hopes and aspirations over the course of her life.

MHC Collection

For example, I learned that she was the daughter of a farmer and that her mother was assisted by a midwife at her birth -- typical of the late 1800s. She was ninth child of 12 children, six boys and six girls and she had brown hair and blue eyes. Because she didn’t receive the book until she was 38, those early pages reveal little else about her early years. Her first few entries record only scant information, but I did lean that she was a trained nurse and in good health. As directed by the book, she updated her height, weight, and measurements annually. I later learned that she was a graduate of the Kingston General Hospital School of Nursing in 1921 and that she did private duty nursing after graduation. She eventually returned to KGH where she remained until retirement at age 65.

A longstanding member of Zonta, the professional women’s organisation, our nurse travelled to annual conferences in addition to trips with her sisters to various places in Ontario, Quebec, and New York State. She sometimes recorded world events that had occurred, items she’d bought, and houses she lived in. I was delighted to read of her purchase shared with her sister of a Pontiac Coupe in 1937 when she was 40. Other entries leave one begging for more. In one case she has clipped out the entry that fell under the words “Very unhappy summer” (age 43) – what was it that she wanted no one ever to see? In another instance she provided no details about the circumstances or subsequent events connected with the diamond ring she received a gentlemen when she was 49. From what I can tell, she never married.

She often recorded her annual salary with the attached notations “good”, “fair”, or “strained” dependent upon her circumstances at the time. In addition to her changing health and medical and dental procedures, she recorded details of operations of family members, their life changes, and eventual deaths. She included the death of Dr. Connell himself in 1947 when she was 51 with the annotation ““Author” of this book.” Did she anticipate that some future researcher would eventually be pouring thorough the diary’s pages? I love the routine quality of some entries: under “Friends” she often answered tersely, “As usual”.

Our nurse was a faithful diarist: she continued to make annual entries into her book until she was 88 years old in 1984, but by then it was clear that she was having difficulty writing. From other nursing school records we have on file, I believe she died four years later around the age of 92. There is so much more one can do with a document like this – it pages are full of questions as much as there are details. We know of several copies of the book in libraries – have they been filled in by their former owners? Have other copies survived elsewhere?

This is truly the “book of a life” – a marvelous record and a rare and valuable research resource. We are now adding it to the Museum’s permanent collection.

Paul Robertson
Curator

Faith, Healing and Medical Miracles

2009-12-02T06:41:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the Museum of Health Care’s first edition of Ex crypta: Curator’s Blog. Ex crypta (From the Vault) will feature periodic entries about artefacts in our collection, intriguing stories related to health care history, or details about ongoing projects or subjects I am pursuing. The Museum’s collection of objects and archival materials documenting the history of health and medicine in Canada contains many wonderful treasures. This blog is one way that we can share some of them with you. And of course, your questions and comments are welcome anytime.

In early November the Museum invited Dr. Jacalyn Duffin to speak on her most recent book, Medical Miracles: Doctors, Saints, and Healing in the Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2009). A record-breaker for this Museum, an overflow crowd of over 300 people gathered to hear the lecture. Dr. Duffin graciously agreed to repeat her talk a second time that night to accommodate everyone who could not get in for the first session – I commend those who waited patiently for an hour outside the lecture room.

Dr. Duffin recounted her years of intensive research in the Vatican archives and library into stories of illness, prayer, treatment, and miraculous cure described in detailed files documenting over 1400 miracles spanning four centuries from six continents. Beatification and canonization are the official process that the Roman Catholic Church uses to recognise men and women who are believed to have lived lives of outstanding holiness, inspired by the grace of God and the spirit of the Gospel and have since died. The Church’s examination of a cause for a particular saint can only be completed when one or more miracles attributed to the saint’s intercession with God can be established. Only supernatural events such as the sudden and irreversible cure of a serious disease are accepted as miracles.

Professor Duffin, who is the Hannah Chair for the History of Medicine at Queen’s University in Kingston, has had a long fascination with the interrelationship between medicine and religion and how each derives meaningful signs from particular instances of human distress. A haematologist as well as a historian, her research interest in medical miracles was sparked in the 1980s when she was requested to read a set of blood and bone marrow microscope slides without being told the reason why or any clinical details. Dr. Duffin concluded that the samples came from a patient suffering from acute leukaemia and who had gone into remission, not once, but twice. Given the information she could glean from the slides, Dr. Duffin assumed the patient had since died. She admits her surprise when she later learned that the patient was alive and attributed her cure to a miracle – the intercession with God of a Montreal woman, Marie-Marguerite d’Youville who had died in 1771. The doctor’s analysis of the blood samples became a deciding factor in the cause for Youville’s canonisation in 1990 as the first Canadian-born saint.

Dr. Duffin also expressed her surprise to learn from her research that about 95 per cent of the recorded miracles she read were connected with healings from physical sickness and that for most doctors provided testimony. The Church has long relied on the expertise of physicians in the canonisation process and respected the knowledge that modern medicine can provide. As Dr. Duffin discovered, as medical diagnosis and treatment evolved over time, so did the nature and frequency of specific illnesses noted in the Vatican’s miracle files.

The role of faith and healing are often overlooked aspects of modern health care. I can certainly think of a number of instances from my own life where prayer has played an important role at times when loved ones and friends have been seriously ill.

Ex-votos, MHC Collection

In combing through the Museum’s collections several years ago I was pleasantly surprised to discover a much wider sampling of artefacts of faith and healing than I would have expected for a museum focused on secular health care. We have some particularly fine examples of ex votos (votive offerings) given by people whose prayers for cure or recovery were answered.

There has long been a strong link between Church and the care of the sick. Roman Catholic nuns ran many early hospitals in mediaeval Europe and when the French began to colonise North America, religious hospitals were founded in Quebec and later across Canada. Kingston, Ontario became home to one of the Church’s early hospital missions: in 1845 members of the Religious Hospitallers of St. Joseph were sent out from Montreal to establish the new Hotel Dieu Hospital in 1845. These nursing sisters had a dual responsibility to save the patient’s soul as well as to care for his body. Essentially they were out to win souls through hospital care.

The care of a hospital patient’s spiritual health remained a task for nurses into the 1900s, particularly in Catholic hospitals. Nursing textbooks from the 1950s advised students to remember the needs of patients who may be looking for reassurance and spiritual help with doubts and conflicts. The Museum’s collection includes at least one prayer book designed to guide nurses and patients in prayer.

Traditionally these ex votos were left at a shrine or church as an expression of thanks to God for healing. The silver and silver-plated metal plaques in our collection have delightful depictions of various body parts representing the area cured. Thought to be German in origin, they likely date from the late 1800s or early 1900s. People of lesser means likely offered ex votos of more perishable materials and few of these are believed to have survived.

Sick call set, MHC Collection

The rituals that take place at the time of extreme sickness and death mark particularly important points in the spiritual journey of a believer. Before the rise of the modern hospital, most people died at home. In preparation for times of serious illness or impending death in the family, faithful Catholics were encouraged to have a "sick call set" containing items helpful to the priest when he came to administer the sacraments. These kits were designed to be ornamental when not in use and included candles, a holy water container, and a crucifix, and sometimes cloths, spoons, plates, a prayer book, and other items required for Holy Communion. The Museum’s sick call set is contained in a small wall-hung wooden cabinet that doubles as a standing crucifix. These kits are also sometimes known as Viaticum cabinets named for the sacrament of communion administered to someone who is dying. In Latin “Viaticum” means “provision for the journey”. The Sacrament of the Sick (also known as Extreme Unction or “Last Rites”) involves anointing the sick person with oil.

These artefacts are currently on display at the Museum – if you are visiting Kingston, we invite you to drop by and see what’s new at the Museum of Health Care.

Paul Robertson
Curator