The death toll of the First World War would have been even greater had it not been for the efforts of the armies’ medical corps to fight for the lives of the wounded. In this lecture, historian Tim Cook describes how the doctors and nurses of the Canadian Army Medical Corps responded to the challenge before them to counter the lethal effects of disease, infection, and of modern weapons designed to defeat their skills. The methods and innovations they adopted were not restricted to the battlefield. Out of their experience grew new approaches to public health and to the treatment of physical and mental trauma which revolutionized the practice of twentieth-century medicine. But the story has a less seemly side, revealed in the records Cook has brought to light concerning the use of body parts for medical examination and for less scientific purposes during and after the war. Join us for a discussion of a lesser known legacy of the First World War and its influence on the history of public medicine and health policy in Canada up to the present day.

“I have a feeling that the information highway has reached a dead end,” says Michael Enright. “We are so flooded with so-called information that we are drowning in it. The result is a dislocation, a sensation that when everything is deemed important in some way, nothing is important. A lot of this is attributable to the internet and the rise of social media. Social media have two fronts; one is the trek of inconsequential people doing inconsequential things. The other is the wide dissemination of hate and the threat of violence, not to mention actual harm done to women, young people, and indeed to the political process itself. To paraphrase T. S. Eliot, ‘with all this information, where is the wisdom?’”