When Margaret Allemang’s PhD came out in 1976, it was the first ever published on Canadian nursing history, reported The Globe and Mail in an obituary July 25 of the much-honoured professor emeritus of University of Toronto’s School of Nursing. Moreover, pointed out Kathryn McPherson, Chair of the School of Women’s Studies at York University, it also deposited a crucial piece of scholarship into the hands of social historians just as they were starting to take stock of women’s history-making contributions. “It was consistent with a genre of women’s history which was about looking at Canada’s female leadership,” McPherson said.
During the 1980s, a group interested in nursing history, including McPherson, began to coalesce around Allemang in meetings hosted at her west Toronto home. In 1993, the group formalized as the Margaret M. Allemang Centre for the History of Nursing. Even without a building or staff, McPherson believes their advocacy helped prevent precious archival materials from being lost during the wave of cutbacks that swept health care in the mid-1990s. She also credits Allemang for bringing nursing history into its own in Canada through her tireless support of academics like herself. “She was a real encourager, a co-ordinator,” McPherson said. “Nursing history is so much part of general social history, so much on the map.”
Coattail investing all the rage: mimic the pros
Coattail investing, where small investors mimic the top pros, may be growing more popular than ever, reported the National Post July 25. “We’re looking for the equivalent of Hollywood stars in investment circles,” said Moshe Milevsky, professor of finance at York’s Schulich School of Business at York University. “As markets have gone nowhere over the past five years – they went down and then recovered – the solution is to find people who you think are making money and attach yourself to them.”
York grad No. 8 on Internet movie database
Our greatest source of entertainment trivia is the almighty Internet Movie Database, especially the one that costs money, the professional version (IMDbPro.com), wrote Hamilton Spectator’s Doug Foley in his July 25 column. He noted that Rachel McAdams is No. 8 on the site’s Top 10: Canada’s gift to the hot list is this 28-year-old London, Ont., native who broke big-time in the surprise hit, The Notebook, and was the key meanie in Mean Girls. A theatre major at York University, she is playing a second banana to Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn in Wedding Crashers and stars in the new Wes Craven offering, Red Eye, coming out Aug. 19.