One way the history of science and technology in Canada is recorded is in artifacts–the flotsam and jetsam of scientific and technological activity across the country. From scientific instruments to hospital supplies to botanical specimens and objects of design, many of these artifacts survive in collections, formal and informal, large and small, across the country.
Through 2023 and 2024, with my colleague at the University of Toronto, Erich Weidenhammer, I guest edited an issue of Canada’s history of science academic journal, Scientia Canadensis, that collects new scholarship focusing on some of these collections.
The Special Issue, called “Artifacts and Opportunity: Science and Technology Collections in Canada,” was published in December 2024. You can find and read the articles–all open access–here. The issue is still growing! We expect to add more articles in the near future.
Editing this Special Issue was a fantastic experience. I loved discovering collections through the eyes of the people who care for them. The variety of perspectives, interests and knowledge of the historians, curators and others who work with these collections is distinctive and wonderful. History that pays attention to material artifacts is a special kind of history–it is often local, practical, down-to-earth, and represents types of people and work who may not be recorded in other ways.
Excitingly, I know that these collections represent only a fraction of the material that survives and represents the fascinating stories of natural knowledge, science, technology and ingenuity that Canada has to offer. But many of such collections are at risk, including some of those documented by the authors here. Often already underfunded and under-resourced, collections and the people who care for them are often regarded as expendable. Scientific or technology collections, especially, are often very vulnerable; this is especially true in Canada, where scientific and technology history has sometimes been overlooked.
Yet the history of Canada is tied inextricably with science. From the natural knowledge that enabled Indigenous people from time immemorial to the present day to traverse, understand and live in this land; through the role of navigation and surveying in the processes of colonization; through the central role of natural resource discovery, use and exploitation across the country; through our ingenious scientist, doctors and engineers who developed new technologies that changed how we do things and what we can do; to our extensive and growing understanding of our natural environment and its role in our endangered planet–we have been continually shaped and reshaped by what we know about the world and what we do in it.
Preserving and protecting and learning from these collections is therefore preserving and learning from Canadian history. There are so many stories that are going untold–or that we’ve let be told by someone else! I was very pleased, therefore, to play host to this great collection of scholarship that will help, just a little, to raise the profile of the value of Canada’s amazing and little-known scientific collections.
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