Hours: Tuesday-Friday, 10:00am-4:30pm
Location: 228 Lancaster Avenue, Saint John, NB, E2M 2K8
Contact: archives@nbm-mnb.ca; 1-506-643-2322; 1-888-268-9595 (toll free)
Access: Researchers must register at the front desk upon arrival.
Website Address: http://www.nbm-mnb.ca/
The New Brunswick Museum was founded in 1842. It is Canada’s oldest continually operating museum. The Museum collects and preserves artifacts and specimens which document the natural and cultural history of New Brunswick and the wider world.
The Museum’s natural history artifact collections consist of more than 300,000 specimens in the fields of botany, geology/paleontology, and zoology. These specimen collections are supplemented by field notes, photographs, pathology reports, tissue analysis, and x-rays. The Museum’s humanities artifact collections consist of 100,000 artifacts from the fields of fine and decorative art, history, militaria, clothing and textiles, and photography. Strengths of these collections include the military and naval history of Canada, the cultural history of Canada’s and New Brunswick’s First Nations people, and contemporary Canadian art. The collections also contain a large number of artifacts from Asia and the South Pacific brought back by New Brunswick sailors and missionaries.
The New Brunswick Museum’s archival collections consist of 300 linear metres of business records, personal papers, and ephemera and 30,000 photographs. These collections document the economic, legal, military, religious, and political history of New Brunswick with an emphasis on the 19th century. The archival collections contain several records related to the history of medicine. The Nurses Association of New Brunswick fonds (1920-2000) consists of 26.82 linear metres of textual records relating to the Nursing History Resource Centre, New Brunswick hospitals, health care professionals, nursing education, and other organizations such as the Victorian Order of Nurses, and the Canadian Nurses Association. The Canadian Cancer Society New Brunswick Division fonds (1947-1983) contains 50 centimetres of records consisting of the minutes of different boards, councils, and committees; and receipt journals. The Saint John Tuberculosis and Respiratory Disease Association fonds (1909-1976) contains 30 centimetres of textual records consisting of minutes, annual reports, and scrapbooks. The Saint John Board of Trade fonds contais a sub-series documenting the activities of the Board’s Health and Welfare Committee.
Other collections related to the history of medicine include the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers fonds; the International Longshoremen’s Association, Local 273 fonds; the Saint John City records; the Rotary Club of Saint John, New Brunswick, Inc. fonds; the Saint John YMCA-YWCA fonds (1869-1988); the Kiwanis Club of Saint John fonds; and the records for The Haven (1887-1893), a home set up to provide of unwed and destitute women.
The New Brunswick Museum has also created a series of virtual exhibitions on various topics related to the history of the province. These exhibitions include: Mark Our Place: Images and Memoirs of New Brunswick in Wartime, Saint John: An Industrial City in Transition, Balls, Bats, and Boats: Sporting and Recreational Activities and Traditions in New Brunswick, and Koluskap: Stories from Wolastoqiyik.