Historians have clearly articulated the ways in which sleeplessness has long been part of the human condition. As an object of medical expertise and public health intervention, however, insomnia is a much more recent invention, having gained its status as a pathology during the 1870s. But while insomnia has attracted considerable and concerted attention from public health authorities allied with sleep medicine specialists, this phenomenon is not well explained by classical medicalization theory, in part because it is the sleepless sufferers, not the medical experts, who typically have the authority to diagnose insomnia. The dynamics of insomnia's history are better described as those of a boundary object, around which concepts and practices of biomedicine and psychology coalesce to frame contemporary notions of self-medicalization and self-experiment.

In 1979, the Canadian Society for the History of Medicine, founded in Quebec City, Canada, in 1950, inaugurated its first official organizational organ, Newsletter/Nouvelles, which ran for 10 issues in five annual volumes. In 1984, this modest means of institutional communication expanded to become the Canadian Bulletin of the History of Medicine / Bulletin canadien d'histoire de la médecine, a peer-reviewed journal that continues to the present. Central to the founding and operation of both publications was Kenneth B. Roberts of the Faculty of Medicine, Memorial University of Newfoundland. This discussion outlines the foundation, evolution, and activities of both these periodicals from 1979 to 1994. Their relationship to the growth of both the Canadian Society for the History of Medicine and the field of medical history in Canada are also delineated.

In the summer of 1954, military surgeon Major Robert Elliott was posted to the British Military Hospital in Iserlohn, Germany, to provide medical care to Canadian soldiers, members of the 5,500-strong Canadian Brigade that had earlier been stationed there as part of Canada's commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Like many other military families, Elliott's family had to remain behind until suitable accommodation for them could be found. Based on the letters that Elliott wrote home to his wife during their eight-month separation, this article provides a glimpse of how both old and new Canadian military policies during the early Cold War period had an impact on his work and his family. The Canadian government's decision to place the Brigade under British control reflected, in part, the long-standing attachment to Britain, but Elliott was often frustrated with how imperial/colonial relations played out in the hospital setting. And the military's initial reluctance to officially allow dependents to join their loved ones overseas, a new phenomenon in Canadian military life, undoubtedly contributed to his confusion and anxiety over when family quarters would finally be finished.

In this study, we examine British Columbia's Hospital Association conference records (1918-31) to understand how place, gender, and profession shaped debates about hospital standardization during the interwar period. The conference records reveal that hospital standardization was conceptualized as the conformity of smaller, peripheral hospitals to larger metropolitan ones. Arguments about how to best address the gaps in small hospitals were often directed to elite nursing leaders, who suggested improved nursing education as a solution. Hospital affiliation was recommended to ensure adequate training for rural nurses by moving trainee nurses from rural to urban hospitals during the last year of their education. Yet the way that affiliation was conceived was more aligned with the professional goals of the nursing elite, rather than the needs of rank-and-file nurses in small hospitals. These ideas ultimately worked to support the goals of standardization, but obscured the divergent needs of small community hospitals.

Thirteen Canadians obtained a doctoral degree from the Faculty of Medicine of Paris between 1822 and 1905. Their studies in France played a decisive role in some of the major trends of 19th-century Canadian history: the formation of a French-Canadian professional bourgeoisie, the formalization of diplomatic ties between Canada and France, the development of bacteriology in America, and the rise of French-Canadian nationalism at the turn of the 20th century. This article traces the careers of these medical doctors by using unpublished sources, mainly their student files and doctoral theses, located through the Pierre Moulinier database and made available by the Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire de Santé of the Université Paris-Descartes. By examining these doctors' travels to Paris, it shows the impact on the Canadian medical profession of the relationship between a former North American colony and its former imperial capital.

In the summer of 1954, military surgeon Major Robert Elliott was posted to the British Military Hospital in Iserlohn, Germany, to provide medical care to Canadian soldiers, members of the 5,500-strong Canadian Brigade that had earlier been stationed there as part of Canada's commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Like many other military families, Elliott's family had to remain behind until suitable accommodation for them could be found. Based on the letters that Elliott wrote home to his wife during their eight-month separation, this article provides a glimpse of how both old and new Canadian military policies during the early Cold War period had an impact on his work and his family. The Canadian government's decision to place the Brigade under British control reflected, in part, the long-standing attachment to Britain, but Elliott was often frustrated with how imperial/colonial relations played out in the hospital setting. And the military's initial reluctance to officially allow dependents to join their loved ones overseas, a new phenomenon in Canadian military life, undoubtedly contributed to his confusion and anxiety over when family quarters would finally be finished.

Historians have clearly articulated the ways in which sleeplessness has long been part of the human condition. As an object of medical expertise and public health intervention, however, insomnia is a much more recent invention, having gained its status as a pathology during the 1870s. But while insomnia has attracted considerable and concerted attention from public health authorities allied with sleep medicine specialists, this phenomenon is not well explained by classical medicalization theory, in part because it is the sleepless sufferers, not the medical experts, who typically have the authority to diagnose insomnia. The dynamics of insomnia's history are better described as those of a boundary object, around which concepts and practices of biomedicine and psychology coalesce to frame contemporary notions of self-medicalization and self-experiment.

In this article I argue that the scarcity of painkillers in the Global South is driven by a central asymmetry in which the health of developed countries is valued over that of the much poorer countries that comprise the rest of the world. To elucidate this point, I argue that by examining the history of various legal institutions and specific events, like the opioid crisis, that have shaped the global production of opium and production in India, one will be able to see the genealogy of the imbalance and inequality that has always affected care. I turn to the state of Kerala to explore instances in which these legal inflections live within the contemporary guidelines for palliative care, and thus constantly affect the supply and delivery of care. This also ties in with the much longer history of opium control for the growth of the global pharmaceutical industry, within which India has been uniquely placed.

In Quebec's historiography, the history of pharmacies and pharmacists straddles the history of medicine, doctors and health, on the one side, and the history of small business and consumerism, on the other. Too much of a hybrid to fit neatly in either of those fields of study, it has largely flown under the historians' radar. This duality is nonetheless fascinating. Not only is it at the very heart of pharmacies' trajectory and evolution in Quebec, but it explicitly highlights the fact that health, medication, and consumerism have historically close ties. Having given the background to an important investigation held in 1899, the paper illustrates the tension between commerce and profession from the mid-19th century to the economic and identity crisis facing pharmacists in the Sixties and Seventies.