Announcing the recipients of the Dimitrije Pivnicki Award

Dr. Dimitrije Pivnicki

Photo of Dr. Pivnicki courtesy of Dr. Beverlea Tallant

The Osler Library is very pleased to announce that we have selected two researchers to recieve the Dimitrije Pivnicki Award in Neuro History and History of Psychiatry to support their research with our collections. This year’s recipients are Shana Cooperstein and Dr. Boleslav Lichterman.

Shana Cooperstein is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. Her doctoral research is on the nature of artistic pedagogy in France in the 19th century. In particular, she investigates methods of artistic training at a crucial historical moment in which the applications of drawing education underwent reform and greatly expanded to domains outside of the art world through their appeal to cognitive development. Her work at the Osler Library will provide the medical context for analyzing the neuroscientific assumptions underlying artistic curricula from the period.

Dr. Boleslav Lichterman is a historian of medical history at the IM Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University in Russia. His research at the Osler Library will aim to provide an overview of logistics and different strategies of management of head injuries during World War I and the subsequent impact on the development of neurosurgery as a specialty field. In particular, he will work with the archival collection of Edward Archibald (1872-1945), known as “Canada’s first neurosurgeon.”

Congratulations to our 2015-2016 recipients! The award was established in 2012 by the family and friends of Dr. Dimitrije Pivnicki (1918-2007), who practiced and taught psychiatry at the Allen Memorial Institute of McGill University from 1956 to 1996. With degrees in law and medicine, he had a wide and eclectic interest in classic and modern languages and literature, and a keen appreciation of the history of neuropsychiatry. To find out more about the award, please visit our website.

 

Announcing the Mary Louise Nickerson Fellowship recipients

Mary Louise NickersonThe Osler Library congratulates Eric Oosenbrug and Dr. Patricia Rosselet, the recipients of the Mary Louise Nickerson Fellowship in Neuro History for 2015-2016.

Dr. Patricia Rosselet is an MD/PhD in Life Sciences at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois and the Institut Universitaire d’Histoire de la Médecine et de la Santé Publique at the Université de Lausanne in Switzerland. Her dissertation is entitled, “Diagnosis by Imaging: the Case of Textbooks of Diseases of the Nervous System (1850-1920).” A specialist in the history of medical imagery and 19th-20th century history of medicine and neuroscience, she will be working on a project at the Osler Library involving the study of 20th century neurological textbooks to trace a paradigmatic shift in the images accompanying neuroscientific texts, from anatomical plates and patient photographs to computerized images of the brain.

Eric Oosenbrug is a PhD candidate in the History and Theory of Psychology program in the Department of Psychology at York University in Toronto. His dissertation research focuses on the development of pain research during the mid-20th century in Montreal. His work at the Osler Library will center around the role of McGill and the Montreal Neurological Institute in the development of pain research and theory in the 1960s, and particularly in the work of Wilder Penfield, Joseph Stratford, Donald O. Hebb, and Ronald Melzack.

Congratulations to our 2015-2016 recipients! For more information about the Nickerson Fellowship, please visit our website. The Mary Louise Nickerson Fellowship was established in 2011 by Granville H. Nickerson, MDCM, in honour and in memory of his wife, who was an inspiration to many of Dr. Nickerson’s classmates of McGill Medicine Class of 1945, an acknowledged scholar, and an enthusiastic promoter of the arts.