About the Project

This website is a portion of the greater research project, “The History of the University of Calgary Faculty of Medicine, 1970-2020 – Its First Fifty Years as a New Medical School in the Province of Alberta” that is currently being researched and written at the University of Calgary (in the Departments of Community Health Science and History). The historiographical research will produce new understandings of the foundation and the early history of the UofC Medical Faculty. As a history project, it investigates particularly the development of the early departments and working fields of Community Health Sciences, Psychiatry and Neurology (within the later Division of Clinical Neuroscience) as well as Family Medicine. These areas were very much in line with the original mandate of the Faculty of Medicine to produce family physicians and serve the Calgary and Southern Albertan community, as advocated for by the founding Dean of Medicine, Dr. William A. Cochrane (b. 1926). Since the community mandate of the UofC Faculty of Medicine soon after began to change and be reconceived within the development of a larger research community and culture at the Foothills Medical Centre, the second part of this project will investigate the creation and impact of the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research (AHFMR) and the development of the University of Calgary as a major research hub in clinical medicine and biomedical science in Alberta.

As part of a larger initiative, this project will augment current research by adding the community perspective to the history of the UofC Faculty of Medicine. In this form, it seeks to take the internal history of the Faculty as it is currently written, concentrating on the historical development of the educational programs, departments, institutes and centres, and integrate it into the inaugurational context of the Faculty to be community oriented, produce physicians for the Province of Alberta and develop health care facilities with the prospect of increasing the available medical resources structures and supporting the provision of close access to intensive medical care on a high university clinical level. This had very interesting implications also for nationally innovative and truly visionary programs, such as the early integration of community-based family medicine with detailed electronic record systems (after the first personal computers had barely been on the market in the 1970s), as introduced through the Department of Family Medicine under its head, the Canadian physician Dr. John B. Corley (b. 1921), and the integration of academic Psychiatry with a strong community mental health service program (“Family Therapy Program”), as it became inaugurated with the first department head, Dr. Keith Pearce, and later further diversified by the New York- and Toronto-trained German-Canadian psychiatrist Dr. Sebastian K. Littmann (1931-1986). These ground-breaking developments contributed to the quality of the clinical and research endeavours at the UofC Faculty of Medicine, as well as to a very unique educational and academic outlook of a modern, flexible and innovative 20th century medical school. To this end, historical research will be pursued in the Archives of the University of Calgary (particularly the archival collections on the Medical Faculty), in the collections of the Glenbow Museum in Calgary (on the former Calgary General Hospital and its integration with the city’s health care system), as well as the Provincial Archives in Edmonton (regarding the accessible archival material on the former Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research).

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