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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