Event

Exhibition Vernissage | Materia Medica

Wednesday, December 13, 2017 17:30to19:30
McIntyre Medical Building Osler Library of the History of Medicine, 3rd floor , 3655 promenade Sir William Osler, Montreal, QC, H3G 1Y6, CA

All are invited to attend a vernissage to celebrate the opening of our newest exhibition, Materia Medica, Wednesday, December 13, 2017 at 5:30pm.

RSVP required. TO RSVP, please click here.


Over the course of a year, visual artist Loren Williams combined artifacts from the Osler collection with collected and created traces of Montreal’s medical past. Williams followed charted streets and routes that link Montreal’s past and present. Using epidemiological maps, she explored the sites and neighbourhoods of the city’s devastating outbreaks of Typhus, Cholera, Small Pox and Tuberculosis.  Other plans of the city led her to sites of hospitals, asylums and the longest duel in Canadian history over the building of a new hospital.

Like the collected plants that echo an early botanical pharmacy, Loren Williams also collected and created other traces of medical history.  X-rays and teeth molds reveal the body’s structures, fractures and medical interventions. First aid kits and their compartments double as garden plans for medicinal plants, while hospital architecture is represented in the form of postcards the shape of library index cards.

These works, presented with artifacts from the Osler Library collection, bring together images and objects from the realm of science, art and everyday life, offering an eclectic, less rational, interconnected perspective of Montreal’s medical history. 

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We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country.
Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays
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