Over the course of the twentieth century, medical schools became bureaucratically-complex, research-oriented institutions with demanding admission requirements and accredited curricula that favoured, explicitly or implicitly, applicants who identified socially as male, white, Protestant, English-speaking, and straight. This developing research project examines how new regulatory procedures and educational ideals, perpetuated by a network of influential actors in organised medicine, encouraged exclusion and/or assimilation of medical students who did not possess this particular cluster of social identifiers.

Susan Lamb is the Jason A Hannah Chair in History of Medicine at the University of Ottawa. Based in the Faculty of Medicine and cross-appointed to History, Dr Lamb’s current research examines developments in Anglo-American medical education in the twentieth century, particularly around who can and cannot become a physician, why, and who says so. They are co-editor of a new volume of histories of medical education (Transforming Medical Education: Historical Case Studies of Teaching, Learning, and Belonging) and author of Pathologist of the Mind: Adolf Meyer and the Origins of American Psychiatry (2014).