The Department of Social Studies of Medicine hosts workshops organized around specific themes and concerns. The departmental workshops are open to all members of the university community and the public.
Writing on Medicine in Climates of Controversy 
April 22, 2026, 1:00 pm - 4:00pm
Thomson House Ballroom, 3rd floor
3650 Rue McTavish
What happens when scholars of medicine study topics that are controversial, legally incendiary, or politically polarizing? How does one strive to write an accurate and even-handed analysis knowing that one’s words and findings will be scrutinized and used by groups outside of academia with their own agendas?
The 2026 workshop by The Department of Social Studies of Medicine, “Writing on Medicine in Climates of Controversy”, explores these questions. The workshop combines a plenary lecture on Medical Assistance in Dying by Daniel Weinstock with a session, moderated by Vanessa Rampton, featuring three SSOM scholars — Phoebe Friesen, Sahar Sadjadi, and Andrea Tone — who recount their experiences navigating the controversies their work has evoked.
Schedule:
Plenary Address 1:00 pm-2:00pm
Medical Assistance in Dying, Ethics, and Democracy
Daniel Weinstock, Katharine A. Pearson Chair in Civil Society and Public Policy in the Faculties of Law and of Arts
Break. 2:00pm-2:15pm
Session 2:15 pm-4:00pm
Complaining about Consent: Using Anesthetized Bodies as Teaching Tools
Phoebe Friesen, Associate Professor, Departments of Equity, Ethics and Policy and Social Studies of Medicine
Children, Gender Transition and What the Debate Cannot Hold
Sahar Sadjadi, Assistant Professor, Department of Social Studies of Medicine
Ewen Cameron: Litigated Legacies, Archival Discoveries
Andrea Tone, Professor, Departments of Social Studies of Medicine and History and Classical Studies
Reception 4:00pm-5:00pm
Histories of Medicine: A Workshop in Honour of George Weisz
May 13, 2026
SSoM, 3647 Peel, Don Bates Seminar Room, 101
1:30pm - 5:30pm
13:30-13:45 Introduction
13:45-14:30 Raúl Necochea López (Chapel Hill) "A Nearly Disavowed Oral History Adventure with Medical Students"
A couple of sentences about it: The Black Alumni Experience Project began in 2021, inspired by medical students’ interest in a fuller account of their place of learning, the School of Medicine at the University of North Carolina. This chronicle addresses BAEP’s origin and rationale, the tricky political waters it navigated and almost sank in, and how it pulls forward some lessons learned from teaching at McGill as a graduate student mentored by George Weisz.
14:30-15:15 Clare Herrick (King’s College London) "The slack in the system: The American healthcare crisis, manpower planning and physician productivity 1950-1980"
This paper examines historical efforts to calculate the health manpower needs of the United States from 1950 to 1980, highlighting how perceived physician shortages justified efforts to maximize the effective utilization of existing medical labor. While federal and philanthropic investment was largely directed to increasing physician supply, research on how physicians might improve their productivity through delegating tasks to allied health personnel has received less attention. Drawing on health economics and manpower studies, the paper explores how physician utilization became a concern amid an American “healthcare crisis” characterized by rising demand for health services, technological change, increasing costs and shifting public expectations. Ultimately, the paper contends that efforts to increase physician productivity, despite remaining a pervasive structural problem facing virtually all healthcare systems worldwide, have neither solved the mystery of how to deliver health services most effectively nor the question of how many physicians are required to do so.
15:15-15:30 Coffee
15:30-16:15 Shelley McKellar (Western University) "The Material Culture of Surgery: ‘Cutting’ Instruments as Expressions of Surgical Values and Competencies"
What might Physick’s tonsillotome (1827) and Heine’s osteotome (1830), which are deemed historically significant but now obsolete surgical instruments, tell us about the practice of surgery during the 19th century? This presentation takes an object-centred approach, with its focus on the use-context and use-value of surgical instruments within broader theories of materiality and meaning, to explore limited-adoption innovation in surgical practice.
16:15-17:00 Elsbeth Heaman (McGill University) "The ‘Demographic Transition’ Between Medicine and Economics in 1940s America"
Following George Weisz’ work on the “epidemiological transition,” I will interrogate the earliest arguments for “demographic transition,” as a matter of disciplinary specialization. The paper will contextualize Frank Notestein’s classic paper in the conference on “Food for the World” held at in Chicago in January 1945 as economists, statisticians, and nutritionists jockeyed over the starving body as an object of knowledge. It will then carry the analysis more deeply into economics, first tracing connections between Notestein and Chicago economists Theodore Schultz and Jacob Viner (who soon moved to Princeton and joined Notestein in an internationalist research centre), then comparing discourses of medical specialization with those of economic specialization that were then subject to bitter dispute at Chicago, notably between Jacob Viner and Frank Knight (the “alternative cost doctrine” debate).
17:00-17:15 George Weisz (McGill University)
17:15 and beyond Reception