Visiting Speaker Series
2023 Visiting Speaker Series:
“A Stitch in Time: Arterial Repair and the Process of Change in Surgery, 1880-1960”
Curator Grant Maltman provides a private tour of Banting House to our guest Dr. Justin Barr and Shauna Devine.
Dr. Justin Barr is currently working as HPB/Transplant Fellow at Toronto General Hospital. Prior to coming to Toronto, Justin Barr was a resident in surgery and an instructor in history at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. Barr earned his medical degree from the University of Virginia while simultaneously matriculating with a PhD in the history of medicine from Yale University. Barr also holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Washington University in St. Louis.
Justin Barr is the author of Of Life and Limb: Surgical Repair of the Arteries in War and Peace, 1880-1960 (University of Rochester Press, 2019), which explores the history of arterial repair and investigates the process of surgical innovation by exploring the social, technological, institutional, and martial dynamics shaping the introduction and adoption of a new operation. Justin has published widely in the field; Click here for a complete list of his publications.
- Five Questions with Dr. Justin Barr (PDF, 831KB)
- Event Poster (PDF, 4.1MB)
About the Visiting Speaker Series
Every autumn a distinguished medical historian is invited to Western University to deliver a public lecture to medical students and faculty as well as interested members of the London community.
The lecture series was established in 2015 through the generosity of a donor impressed with the engagement and quality of medical student presentations in the history of medicine at the spring History of Medicine Colloquium at Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry.
In this spirit, this funding further bolsters medical student engagement with the history of medicine by bringing leading scholars to Western, significantly adding to the intellectual community and educational experience of students.
Past Speakers
- 2022 - Dr. Mindy Schwartz, MD in the Department of Medicine at the University of Chicago Medical Center “The Real Dr. Guillotin and Adventures from the Medicine of History”
2022 lecture information and photo gallery - 2021 - Erika Dyck, PhD, CRC in the History of Medicine, University of Saskatchewan, & Maureen Lux, PhD, Professor of History, Brock University "Challenging Choices: Canada's Population Control in the 1970s"
2021 lecture information and photo gallery - 2019 - Dr. Scott Podolsky, MD Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard University
"The Antibiotic Era: Reform, Resistance, and the Pursuit of a Rational Therapeutics"
2019 lecture information and photo gallery - 2018 - Dr. Susan Reverby, McLean Professor Emerita in the History of Ideas and Professor Emerita of Women's and Gender Studies at Wellesley College
"Insights into the unusual and revolutionary journey of Dr Alan Berkman (1945-2009)"
2018 lecture information and photo gallery
- 2017 - Dr. Jeffrey Baker, Director of the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities and History of Medicine, Professor of Pediatrics and History of Medicine at Duke University, Durham, NC
"Autism and Its Transformations The History of a Contested Diagnosis"
2017 lecture information and photo gallery
- 2016 - Dr. Jacalyn Duffin, Hannah Chair in the History of Medicine, Queen's University
"The Stethoscope at 200: A Revolutionary Device now Obsolete?"
2016 lecture information and photo gallery
- 2015 - Prof. Dale C. Smith, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, MD
"Caring for the Wounded: How the Great War Medical Experience Shaped Post-War American Surgery"
2015 lecture information and photo gallery
