The Medical Artifact Collection

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The Medical Artifact Collection

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A collection of medical artifacts from the late 18th c. to the present in SW Ontario.

01/06/2026

Happy New Year! The Medical Artifact Collection is pleased to present a new exhibit in our main display case, curated by our very capable students Erin Case, Kim DelMedico, and Audrey McKenzie! Please stop by Lawson Hall and get your dose of "Rx: Take Twice Daily," an exploration of the history of pharmacy in London, Ontario.

11/07/2025

Thank you so much for having me! What a wonderful audience!

08/11/2025

Thanks so much to the lovely folks at Richmond Woods Retirement Living for having our curator come in and do a medical history talk for the residents!

06/09/2025

Our curator and senior curator had the pleasure last weekend of attending the Canadian Society for the History of Medicine (CSHM) 75th anniversary conference at George Brown College! Attendees enjoyed a walking tour of Toronto's medical history, lots of great presentations (including an excellent one from grad Paige Murray), and a wonderful banquet to top it all off. Thank you to everyone who organized and participated!

03/25/2025

Last week, our Medical Artifact Collection curator was privileged to be able to travel to Kingston and present her research on representing disability in museums and archives at the Teaching with Cultural Heritage Towards Health Equity and Justice Symposium hosted by and Queen's University. Thank you to all the organizers, especially Museum of Health Care curator Rowena McGowan and Queen's University historians Allison Morehead and Jenna Healey, and to all the presenters for an excellent, thought-provoking day!

01/20/2025

is here again! We finally have the answer from our last post in 2024-- this artifact is an ether dropper bottle. Ether was first used as a general anaesthetic in the 1840s, and would have been used in conjunction with an anaesthesia mask and cloth. The dropper attached to the cork of the bottle would be used to drip controlled amounts of ether onto the cloth over the patient's mouth and nose to be breathed in.

11/29/2024

Can you guess this week's artifact?

11/12/2024

Most of you got last week's exactly correct! These are a set of ni**le shields, used by breastfeeding mothers to ease some of the pain of nursing. This pair is made of wood, but they have also historically been made of metal and today are most often made from silicone. Join us again next week!

11/08/2024

Welcome back! Can you guess this week's ?

11/05/2024

Did you guess last week's artifact? If you guessed that it was for colour matching for dentures, you guessed right! This is the Veri-Chrome Color Guide from the Universal Dental Co. out of Philadelphia, Pa., USA. The company made dentures out of porcelain and plastic, and included colour guides like this one in their "student kits" to help students learn to blend different colours in the same denture.

Join us again this Friday for another mystery artifact!

Address

1151 Richmond Street
London, ON
N6A 3K7

Website

https://medicalhistory.uwo.ca/, https://linktr.ee/MedicalArtifactCollection

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