Ellen Amster is the Jason A. Hannah Chair in the History of Medicine at McMaster University and Associate Professor in the Departments of Family Medicine and Religious Studies. She received her B.A. from the University of Chicago and Ph.D. From the University of Pennsylvania.
The experience of serving as a simultaneous Arabic-English-French translator for ORBIS, an NGO that offers ocular surgical continuing education around the world in a plane/teaching hospital, led Dr. Amster to leave traditional history for McMaster University to work with medical students and religious studies.
Her research engages medicine in the Islamic world, France, and North America, focusing especially on global health, nonwestern healing, women’s histories, and French and British empire.
Her love of Morocco is reflected in her award-winning book, Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco (University of Texas Press), from which she developed an interdisciplinary global health field course for Canadian undergraduate students in Morocco, and the CIHR-funded Morocco-Canada Network in Maternal and Infant Health.
Ongoing projects include the transnational legacies of race and colonialism in medicine, the history of public health, women, midwifery, and gender in medicine, and medical education. Her research has been funded by IIE Fulbright-Hayes, the Chateaubriand Program of France, the Social Science Research Council, AIMS, SSHRC, and CIHR.
Dr. Amster provides a regular speaker series in the history of medicine open to the campus and the public.
Her teaching includes research electives and professional competencies for MD students in the Michael DeGroote School of Medicine, support for all FHS students in the histories of health, and Islamic studies in the Department of Religious Studies.
For everyone to enjoy, she developed the AMS-funded Hannah History of Medcine and Medical Humanities Research Portal, with hundreds of libraries, archives, museums, digital collections, and grants, to browse for research and fun.
MD students are always welcome to come for individual electives and discussion! She also works with McMaster MD students in health research.
