Madeleine Mant and Johanna Cole // The recent conservation and digitization of prison admission records from Her Majesty’s Penitentiary (HMP) and its predecessor, the courthouse jail, have made available a rich dataset for historical, sociological, and anthropological research regarding crime and punishment in the long 19th century in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. Our research…
Author: Madeleine Mant
Dr. Madeleine Mant is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Her biocultural research program focuses upon health inequities in marginalized and institutionalized human groups through an interdisciplinary integration of bioanthropological and archival datasets.
Embodying public health: Dressing the part
Madeleine Mant // The Canadian Public Health Association has identified 12 “great achievements” in public health since the early 1900s: Control of infectious disease Decline in deaths from coronary heart disease and stroke Family planning Healthier environments Healthier mothers and babies Motor-vehicle safety Recognition of tobacco use as a health hazard Safer and healthier foods…
Subjective objects
Madeleine Mant // As an anthropologist of health, I am deeply invested in both bodies and objects relating to bodies. I want to know how access to healthcare becomes embodied in varied sets of data, from human skeletal remains to institutional records to material culture. Traces of lived lives wait quietly, some beneath the soil,…
Measures of success
Madeleine Mant // Tell me what the measurement is. Tell me why the measurement is important. Ask if it’s okay with me that you take this measurement. I teach Laboratory Methods in Biological Anthropology, an undergraduate course divided into three units: dietary recall and analysis, anthropometry (measurements and proportions of the human body), and accelerometry…
Remember to forget: Pandemic research during a pandemic
Madeleine Mant // When did it hit you that COVID-19 was serious? Do you remember how you felt on March 20, 2020? Has that feeling changed? Since the outset of the pandemic in Canada, I have been leading a team of researchers examining responses to and perceptions of the outbreak. The University of Toronto, where…
Health histories from watery places: Seafaring bodies in the labour archive
Madeleine Mant // In the basement of an unassuming building on the Memorial University campus in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, lies the Maritime History Archive (MHA), curating the employment records of Britain’s Registrar General of Shipping and Seamen (RGSS). Approximately 75% of all surviving logbooks and Agreements from 1857 to 1942 and 1951 to…
Behind the Beak: Plague Doctor Iconography in 2020
Madeleine Mant // 2020 is the year of the mask. Whether manufacturing, stockpiling, MacGyvering, sewing, 3D printing, or debating them, masks are (figuratively, if not literally) on everyone’s lips. The efficacy and culture of masks as personal protective equipment has been investigated for over a century’s worth of diseases, including the 1910-’11 Manchurian plague (Lynteris),…
Health by Post: Telemedicine and the Long Eighteenth Century
Madeleine Mant // The profound synergistic effect that distance—both geographic and sociocultural—plays upon health care access and outcomes is no surprise to contemporary physicians. As modern technological interventions such as eConsult, which allows patients’ cases to be ‘seen’ by a specialist without an in-person visit, become more commonplace, it is worthwhile to reflect on the…
Write/Right About Your Body
Madeleine Mant // I teach Introduction to the Anthropology of Health to an exquisitely diverse group of second-year undergraduate students. The class is a gateway prerequisite to all upper-level health-stream courses, thus it necessitates a balance between the biological and sociocultural aspects of health anthropology. Students are exposed to the work of Gregor Mendel and…
Medical Memories and Realities in Newfoundland and Labrador
Madeleine Mant // If you went looking for the Pilley’s Island hospital today, as I did one windswept July afternoon, all you would find is a private driveway at the top of a sharp incline, partially overgrown with the tall grasses and stout greenery typical of the Newfoundland and Labrador landscape. Down the hill, past…