Shelley McKellar

Shelley McKellar is the Hannah Chair in the History of Medicine in the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry and Professor of History in the Faculty of Social Science at Western University.  Her scholarship focuses on the history of surgery and the history of medical technology, with a special interest in the history of instruments and devices, heart disease, and medical biography.

Shelley is author of Artificial Hearts: The Allure and Ambivalence of a Controversial Medical Technology; Medicine and Technology in Canada, 1900-1950 and Surgical Limits: The Life of Gordon Murray, as well as co-editor of Essays in Honour of Michael Bliss: Figuring the Social (with Elsbeth Heaman and Alison Li, 2008).  She has published articles in various journals, including The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, Technology and Culture, and the Canadian Bulletin of Medical History.

Shelley was an invited member of the Expert Advisory Group for the Medical Sensations exhibit at the recently re-opened Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa; an invited member of the History and Heritage Advisory Committee at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada; an invited contributor to the ‘boot camp’ curriculum of the American College of Surgeons; and an elected council member of the American Association for the History of Medicine.  She has served on numerous research grant review committees, book prize committees, academic meeting program committees, and as manuscript reviewer for various academic presses and journals. In 2019, Shelley was named as Western University Faculty Scholar.

Shelley’s work as a medical historian proves instrumental to the Board as AMS remains the primary funder of medical history in Canada and promotes a rich understanding of healthcare’s past in addition to a focus on its future.