bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The History of the Canadian Society for the History of Medicine
Authors: Duffin Jacalyn , Potter Paul
Published: December 2016

On 24 October 1950, 14 people met at the invitation of the abbé Arthur Maheux in the Institut d’Histoire et de Géographie of the Université Laval in Quebec City to form the Société canadienne d’histoire de la médecine (SCHM). Among them were physicians, historians, and archivists. Dr. Sylvio Leblond (1901–1990), internist and instructor of medical history at Laval, was elected president and served in this capacity until he moved to Chicoutimi in December 1951.
Mapping “Region” in Canadian Medical Historv: The Case of British Columbia
Authors: Davies Megan J
Published: December 2016

The notion of “region” can be a valuable analytical tool in the writing of Canadian medical history. This article explores themes in the history of British Columbia that link medicine and regional development. Employing a historiographical sweep from the colonial period to the 1970s, the author considers doctors and imperialism, medical practice and the economy, and the relationship between metropolis and periphery in shaping medical institutions and medical culture in the western province. The intent of the piece is to stimulate thought about the potential of introducing the sense of place into regional medical history in Canada.
Portraits of People with Mental Disorders in English Canadian History
Authors: Reaume Geoffrey
Published: December 2016

This paper will discuss the ways in which academic and non-academic historians in English Canada have portrayed people with mental disorders. The phrase “people with mental disorders” refers to individuals who were considered mentally disturbed by their contemporaries and/or by historians. This includes discussion of people who were in mental institutions as well as people who were never confined. Citations are from both detailed studies and fleeting references on this topic. Areas considered include portraits of people with mental disorders as being anonymous, passive, active, named, dangerous, untrustworthy; they also include the problem of stereotypes in the writing of this history.
Note du rédacteur invité: Les Amérindiens et l’histoire de la médecine
Authors: Trafzer Clifford
Published: December 2016

En juillet 2000, j’ai eu la chance unique de m’entretenir avec Pauline Murillo, une personne âgée de la réserve San Manuel située en Californie du Sud, et femme de descendance amérindienne Serrano et Cahuilla. Le père et le grand-père de Pauline Murillo étaient des «guérisseurs», formés à soigner les affections physiques, spirituelles et mentales selon les traditions ancestrales de leur peuple. Au cours de l’entretien, Pauline Murillo m’a confié que sa mère, Martha Manuel Chacon, contracta un jour une «spirit medicine» et tomba gravement malade. Elle explique que Martha et son cousin, Vincent, jouaient un jour dans la réserve, quand un guérisseur prévint les enfants d’éviter un liquide se trouvant dans un endroit proche, dans lequel il avait «laissé quelque chose pour quelqu’un d’autre». Curieux, les enfants allèrent examiner la chose de plus près, en conséquence de quoi, Martha contracta une forte fièvre et tomba mortellement malade. Les parents de Martha et sa famille l’emmenèrent à San Bernardino consulter un médecin qui la soigna, mais ne put faire tomber la fièvre. La famille de Martha l’emmena donc à Palm Springs, en Californie, où un Cahuilla, Pedro Chino, la guérit. Au cours du traitement, Martha vit de minuscules petits hommes courir autour de son corps, concourant au processus de guérison. Chino finit par extraire un petit objet de la jambe de Martha, mettant ainsi fin à son épreuve.
Le renforcement des interventions gouvernementales dans le domaine de la santé entre 1922 et 1936: le Service provincial d’hygiène de la province de Québec
Authors: Desrosiers Georges , Gaumer Benoît , Hudon François , Keel Othmar
Published: December 2016

L’année 1997 marquait le 75e anniversaire de fondation du Service provincial d’hygiène sans que nous ne disposions d’une histoire approfondie de ce Service, à la fois successeur du Conseil supérieur d’hygiène (1887) et prédécesseur du ministère de la Santé (1936). Or, des changements décisifs se sont produits au Québec dans le domaine de la santé publique durant la période comprise entre les années 1922 et 1936 qui est celle où a fonctionné le Service provincial d’hygiène. Comme nous allons le voir, l’État provincial, à travers cet organisme, a joué un rôle déterminant dans la mise en place d’un premier système de santé publique coordonné à l’échelle de la Province ainsi que dans la mise en oeuvre d’un processus de médicalisation de la société. À ces deux niveaux, l’intervention de l’État fédéral s’est combinée à celle du gouvernement provincial à partir de 1919, avec la création du ministère de la Santé fédéral. Mais quelle était la structure de cet organisme provincial de santé publique? Comment fonctionnait-il? De quels moyens et de quels services disposait-il pour mettre en oeuvre une telle politique de santé et de prévention? Notre étude veut répondre à ces questions qui n’ont été traitées que succinctement par l’historiographie jusqu’à présent. Si, au cours des années précédentes certains chercheurs ont commencé à se pencher sur la question de la mise en place à l’époque d’une politique de santé, par contre, on n’a pas encore d’analyse de la structure de cet appareil d’Etat, de son organisation, de son mode de fonctionnement et de ses moyens d’action. Cette étude offre, simultanément, une nouvelle illustration très probante de la thèse mise de l’avant par les auteurs dans de précédents travaux: à savoir qu’il faut rectifier la vision historique selon laquelle, avant la Révolution tranquille, le domaine de la santé aurait été figé dans l’immobilisme de la société québécoise et, qu’absent de ce domaine, l’État n’aurait pas eu de politique de santé en raison de l’inertie, voire de la résistance des forces «libérales» et du clergé.
Le malade et son médecin: le cadre de la relation thérapeutique dans la deuxième moitié du XVIIIe siècle
Authors: Louis-Courvoisier Micheline
Published: December 2016

Si l’intimité du colloque singulier entre un malade et son médecin reste en partie inaccessible à tout observateur extérieur, il n’en demeure pas moins que des facteurs historiques, sociaux et culturels conditionnent cette rencontre. Une analyse de tels facteurs procure un cadre à la relation thérapeutique et fournit des éléments de comparaison susceptibles d’éclairer le présent. C’est dans cette perspective que s’inscrit cette publication, basée sur environ 1,300 consultations épistolaires envoyées au Dr Tissot, célèbre médecin suisse, qui exerça entre 1750 et 1797. La plupart de ces documents, rédigés par des malades ou par des médiateurs «laïcs», témoignent de la manière dont les malades et leurs proches perçoivent la figure sociale du médecin, conçoivent les notions de pouvoir, d’argent, de temps et d’espace, qui s’inscrivent au sein de l’interaction entre le médecin et son patient.
Administrative Records Management and Archival Program: The Kingston Experience
Authors: Low James A
Published: December 2016

Administrative records management and archival programs are important to the administration of health care institutions and to the historian of health care. The development of an administrative records management and archival program at the Kingston General Hospital is outlined in this report. This program has been possible because of the endorsement of the President and Board of Directors, the appointment of a hospital archivist, and an agreement to maintain the archives in Queen’s University Archives. The records of the Kingston General Hospital Archives reflect the dramatic transformation from a charitable institution of the mid-19th century to a tertiary care centre. Much of the history of health care in Canada will be lost unless similar initiatives to ensure the preservation of primary records of Canadian health care institutions are undertaken.
Foucault plus twenty: On writing the history of Canadian psychiatry in the 1980s
Authors: Brown Thomas E
Published: December 2016

The untimely recent death of French philosopher-historian Michel Foucault, at the age of 57, serves as a sad reminder that twenty years have now passed since the publication in English translation of his seminal 1961 study Historie de la Folie. In the intervening years, and largely as a result of Foucault's provocative revisionism, the history of psychiatry has emerged as one of the most exciting and controversial growth areas of the “new social history”. Scholars, in both Europe and the United States, have begun a critical re-assessment of the history of “madhouses, mad-doctors and madmen” in post-Reformation Western society. In particular attention has focused on the origins and development of the lunatic asylum in the nineteenth century. Rejecting the long-held “Whig” explanation of the institution as one of the great nineteenth century “reforms”, revisionist historians have erected a new “social control” model in its place. Recently, however, this “new orthodoxy” of interpretation has itself come under attack as a second generation of asylum studies has begun to appear in print. Still confined, for the most part, to reviews and articles, this new work, less strident and dogmatic in tone than that of the “social control” historians, points to a more balanced and nuanced account of the nineteenth century asylum experience. Psychiatric history is once again in a state of flux and it seems highly unlikely that the decade of the 1980s will close without seeing the production of one or more new synthetic overviews of nineteenth century psychiatry to match those produced by David Rothman and Andrew Scull in the 1970s.
La problématique institutionnelle de la clinique en France et à l'étranger de la fin du XVIIIe siècle à la période de la Restauration
Authors: Keel Othmar
Published: December 2016

Selon la thèse la plus répandue en histoire de la médecine, la médecine clinique de la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle serait encore une médecine de type hippocratique, basée sur l'observation au chevet du malade, mais le plus souvent hors du cadre hospitalier. Tout du moins, 1'expérience du milieu hospitalier serait très accessoire et marginale pour cette médecine.
Que faire? Le gouvernement ontarien et la consommation des drogues à des fins récréatives, 1966–1972
Authors: Martel Marcel
Published: December 2016

Cet article explore la construction de la consommation de drogues illégales comme un problème social dans le contexte des années 1960. Il s’intéresse particulièrement aux actions et réactions de trois groupes, soit le gouvernement ontarien, l’Addiction Research Foundation de l’Ontario et les citoyens. Il démontre que le débat se déroule dans un contexte d’ignorance au sujet des conséquences de la consommation de drogues illégales sur la santé mais aussi dans un climat de panique morale. L’expertise médicale est sollicitiée pour guider l’action gouvernementale mais celle-ci est graduellement contestée par d’autres groupes médicaux mais aussi par les citoyens qui, par l’envoi de lettres au Premier ministre ontarien et à son ministre de la Santé, tentent d’influencer les politiques gouvernementales.
Special Supplement: “Creative/Artistic Narratives of Illness”
Authors: Arnold Richard , Stanley Marni , Biffar Donna , Lukiv Dan , Buntin Simmons , Bowering Marilyn , Schmidt K. Louise , Brown Allan , Baker Winona
Published: December 2016

Creative expressions of the personal experience of illness have been in the literature for at least three thousand years; the Hebrew Bible, for example, contains the stories of Job, Lazarus, the Centurion’s daughter, and many others who sickened and died. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, plague and other diseases were rife in Europe, and some of the greatest poetry of Dante, Shakespeare, Jonson, Swift, etc., uses sickness as a central theme. Anne Bradstreet, “the first poet in America,” seems almost obsessed with infant and child mortality in her work - yet it was a common occurrence in daily life of the seventeenth century. In Victorian Canada, the Ontario psychiatrist R. M. Bucke recognized the unique ways literature and medicine could be explored, publishing a book on the well-known poet Walt Whitman. (The relationship of these two men is also the focus of a recent National Film Board production, Beautiful Dreamers - a film which, incidentally, is indebted to the research of CBMH editor Cheryl Krasnick Warsh).
Tarnished Adornment: The Troubled History of Québec’s Institut du Radium
Authors: Hayter Charles
Published: December 2016

In 1922 the Québec government appropriated $100,000 for the purchase of radium to found an Institut du Radium at the University of Montreal. Opened largely through the initiative and drive of Dr. Joseph-Ernest Gendreau, the Institut was the first organization devoted to radium therapy and cancer treatment in Canada. This paper describes the background, origins and development of the Institut with a focus on the medical, political, and cultural factors which led to its establishment. From the point of view of the Québec government, the Institut was a way of showing its commitment to health care, of strengthening cultural bonds with France, and of demonstrating the province’s emerging technological prowess. Radium was to be an adornment which showed off the scientific advancement of 20th century Québec. Unfortunately, the Institut never achieved the scientific or cultural stature promised by the rhetoric which surrounded its opening, and this paper will examine the factors which led to its instability and eventual demise. In addition to an overwhelming clinical workload, chronic underfunding and geographic isolation, the Institut fell victim to medical politics. Its success was undermined by opposition from medical groups and competition from hospitals which led to the establishment of multiple radium centres in Montreal. A fundamental problem was confusion over whether its role should be a research institute, a general medical clinic, or a specialized cancer centre. Despite numerous financial and administrative crises and the severing of its academic affiliation in 1945, the Institut survived until 1967. Despite its troubled history, the Institut made an important contribution to Canadian medicine through its ground breaking role in the establishment of radiotherapy and cancer treatment. In addition, the lessons learned from its difficulties proved useful to other provinces planning their own cancer programs.
Oswald Avery: The Professor, DNA, and the Nobel Prize That Eluded Him
Authors: Ghose Tarunendu
Published: December 2016

In 1944, two Canadians, Oswald Avery and Colin MacLeod, and an American, MacLyn McCarty, publiShed a paper in The Journal of Experimental Medicine that demonstrated genes to be the chemical, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Even though this paper is now regarded as the single most important publication in biology of the 20th century, Avery was not awarded the Nobel Prize. This raises the question as to why his work did not earn him the Prize. There are several possible reasons: the discovery may have been ahead of its time; all three authors were physician-scientists and not recognized chemists or geneticists; and Avery, the principal author, had reached an advanced age and characteristically took an extremely cautious and low-key approach to his work. Discussion of these reasons in turn raises other issues surrounding the recognition of the work of celebrated scientists, from Galileo and Copernicus onwards.
Sanitary Medicine and the Social Body: The case of National Civil Registration and Statistics in Canada, 1855–75
Authors: CURTIS BRUCE
Published: December 2016

Civil registration and vital statistics are important elements in the definition of a social body, the primary object whose health and well-being is the aim of social medicine. The failure of the federal government to organize a national system of civil registration in the Confederation era is placed in the context of a variety of sources of pressure for ilto do so from doctors, social reformers, and provincial and municipal officials.
“They Gave Their Care, but We Gave Loving Care”: Defining and Defending Boundaries of Skill and Craft in the Nursing Service of a Manitoba Mental Hospital during the Great Depression
Authors: Dooley Chris
Published: December 2016

The School of Nursing at the Brandon Hospital for Mental Diseases was established in 1921 to equip the hospital with a corps of nurses equal to those found in urban general hospitals. While the school replicated the form of the general hospital training school, its credential was rejected by the national associations of graduate nurses. Without the possibility of registration, the mental nurses of the 1920s evolved a culture of resistance to the strictures of the training school, one which included affiliation with a trade union.

Although still shut-out by the general nursing community, the nurses of the 1930s, arriving with a different sense of their occupational and social mobility, were more disposed to embrace the professional ideology of the training school. By invoking their superior ability to care and their learned capacity to function in the unpredictable environment of the mental hospital, they constructed mental nursing as a skilled craft based on proprietary knowledge, different from the work of both the general hospital nurse and the untrained ward attendant.
“We Have Worked while We Played and Played while We Worked”: Discipline and Disobedience at the Kingston General Hospital Training School for Nurses, 1923-1939
Authors: Wishart James M
Published: December 2016

Drawing on evidence found in nurses’ journals, oral accounts, yearbooks and other cultural productions as well as in hospital records, this paper considers the experiences of apprentices in a hospital nursing training school in the interwar period. By combining elements of scientific management with an older paternalist ethos, hospital administrators sought to imprint student nurse “material” with standards of work and behaviour valued by the hospital institution and the community that supported it. Students, whose expectations for nursing school often conflicted with those of management, developed a culture of mutuality that provided them with valuable resources to subvert and/or ameliorate the effects of disciplinary technologies and to re-appropriate the spaces and discourses of nursing training.
International Sexual Reform and Sexology in Europe, 1897–1933
Authors: Matte Nicholas
Published: December 2016

This paper looks at the relationship of sex reformers and sexology to social reform in Europe in the 20th century prior to the outbreak of World War I. It considers a variety of emerging sexual classification systems and national reform efforts, with special attention to Magnus Hirschfeld and the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, which was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933. It argues that during this time period the international connections between individual reformers and sexologists developed into a transnational network that was able, to a certain extent, to protect and encourage the rights of sexual minorities both within and beyond national borders.
Nearly Queerly: The Life and Death of a Queer Health Advisory Committee
Authors: Egan John
Published: December 2016

This paper examines how a group of grassroots activists successfully lobbied for the creation of a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) persons’ population health advisory committee in Vancouver-Richmond, British Columbia. It documents how committee members balanced the at times conflicting interests of an institutional structure (the public health system) with those communities historically marginal to such institutions. The specific achievements and challenges of the committee and its members during its four-year life span, 1997-2001, are discussed, including their ramifications in other contexts.
“More Than Just Boots! The Eugenic and Commercial Concerns behind A. R. Kaufman’s Birth Controlling Activities”
Authors: Revie Linda
Published: December 2016

A. R. Kaufman (1885–1979), founder of the Kitchener-based Kaufman Rubber Company, was nicknamed “Canada’s Mr. Birth Control” because he established the Parents’ Information Bureau (PIB)—a birth control information centre that functioned out of his factory office. Besides creating mail order/home visiting services, Kaufman also funded birth control clinics. Because he was a rubber manufacturer, it was widely believed that commercial concerns were behind his activities. This article examines recently archived material, local newspaper accounts, and court transcripts to connect A. R. Kaufman and the PIB with the manufacture of contraceptive products. It also outlines Kaufman’s involvement with the eugenics movement, especially his dealings with medical practitioners who carried out sterilization procedures for the PIB.
Physiatrie and German Maternal Feminism: Dr. Anna Fischer-Dückelmann Critiques Academic Medicine
Authors: Meyer Paulette
Published: December 2016

Alternative medicine and reform strategies made Anna Fischer-Dückelmann a most controversial, notorious, and widely read women doctor before World War I. She published a dozen titles in 13 languages asserting that national well-being depended on maternal prowess. To her critics, Fischer-Dückelmann’s commitment to medical self-help and practices of Physiatrie amounted to medical quackery. Her career has been largely unexamined, yet her feminist critiques and social concerns are not far removed from modern social medicine. For this pioneering doctor, treating physical and emotional ills and promoting the health of families were first steps toward healing the divisions of a world at war.
Learning through Objects: Development of the UWO Medical Artifact Collection as a Teaching and Research Resource
Authors: Hamilton Michelle A , Mckellar Shelley
Published: December 2016

In 2004, the authors redeveloped the UWO Medical Artifact Collection as a teaching and research resource. Students enjoy learning through objects and gain new historical inquiry skills and insights in working with artifacts as primary sources. This paper also discusses collections management issues and object research.
“The Glands of Destiny:” Hygiene, Hormones and English Women Doctors in the First Half of the 20th Century
Authors: Brookes Barbara
Published: December 2016

Members of the English Medical Women’s Federation, founded in 1917, were at the forefront of research into menstruation and menopause in the interwar years. As new hormonal understandings of the menstrual cycle emerged, women doctors and international sanitary product companies sought to educate women about their changing bodies and to reconfigure menstruation and menopause as minor events in women’s lives which in no way inhibited their activities. Changing educational and employment patterns of women meant that both events, once managed in the context of the home, were increasingly managed in a public context. As knowledge of hormones increased, menopause was described as a deficiency disease which could be treated by hormone therapy. Just as one set of gendered assumptions about health, to do with menstrual disability, faded from view, medical women were exposed to another, the idea that estrogens were constitutive of femininity.
L’Accouchement Sans Douleur. Un enjeu politique en France pendant la guerre froide
Authors: Caron-Leulliez Marianne
Published: December 2016

L’Accouchement Sans Douleur (ASD) fut introduit en France par le docteur Lamaze en 1951. Si l’événement fut d’importance dans l’histoire de l’obstétrique et de la condition féminine, c’est à un autre aspect que nous voulons nous attacher ici en montrant combien il fut lié aux débats politiques qui agitaient cette époque. Nous étions en pleine guerre froide. Lamaze, sans être membre du parti communiste (PCF), en était sympathisant. Il dirigeait une maternité appartenant à la CGT, un syndicat proche du PCF. Et c’est lors d’un voyage en URSS qu’il avait découvert en 1951 cette nouvelle méthode visant à analgésier les couches par une formation psychologique inspirée de Pavlov. A son retour, lorsqu’il se consacra à la diffusion de l’ASD, il trouva l’aide du PCF et s’appuya sur son réseau de propagande ; ce qui suscita en retour méfiance et hostilité.

En quelques années pourtant, l’ASD s’imposa grâce au soutien des femmes conquises par ce progrès. Au moment où Lamaze triomphait, il fut victime d’un sursaut du stalinisme : avec son équipe, il dénonça l’intervention soviétique en Hongrie et perdit le soutien financier des syndicalistes propriétaires de sa clinique. Fatigué et profondément déçu, il mourut en mars 1957.
From King Kong Pills to Mother’s Little Helpers—Career Cycles of Two Families of Psychotropic Drugs: The Barbiturates and Benzodiazepines
Authors: Pieters Toine , Snelders Stephen
Published: December 2016

This article compares the careers of two families of 20th-century psychotropic drugs, the barbiturates and the benzodiazepines, in five different countries. Both families of drugs were used as so-called hypnotics and sedatives, and later as minor tranquillizers. In addition these drugs were extensively used as self-medication. The careers show a cyclical temporal course and generally encompass three phases: first, an expanding use of the drugs, accompanied by high expectations; then, rising criticism and disappointment; and finally contracting use and limited application. These phases need not have been sequential: they often overlapped. The cycle sometimes ended by the disappearance of the drug from mental health care, only to be replaced by new drugs with a profile of promise and hope.

These cycles, which we term Seige cycles, are generally typical for the careers of psychotropic drugs. The analytical concept of the Seige cycle facilitates a comparative perspective on the commonalities as well as the differences between the various drug careers under consideration.
“Liberation Sticks” or “Coffin Nails”? Representations of the Working Woman and Cigarette Smoking in Canada, 1919–1939
Authors: Cook Sharon Anne
Published: December 2016

When Canadian women first took up public smoking in the 1920s, the attraction was a complex one, both for them and for advertisers. Newly enfranchised and moving into the workforce in ever greater numbers, the (usually) young and single waged or salaried woman sought a ready symbol for her liberation as well as the pleasures resulting from the product itself to encapsulate the presumed freedom of the era. Commercial interests both responded to women’s personal and cultural goals and furthered them by reconceptualizing smoking in the public mind as a behaviour associated with respectable, middleclass women in public spaces. Despite this representation, the archetypal woman smoker in the 1920s was a waged or salaried woman, not a middleclass one. Working women defined the image of the female smoker.
Clinically Correct? AIDS Education in Ontario in the 1980s and 1990s
Authors: Lenskyj Helen Jefferson
Published: December 2016

This paper reviews AIDS prevention initiatives in Canada and the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, and presents a content analysis of print materials used in Ontario during this period. Problems in public health publications included biased approaches, inaccessible or clinical language, anti-sex messages, and imprecise or ambiguous information. Community AIDS groups pioneered creative and effective pedagogical approaches that merit the careful attention of health educators. The Toronto case study showed how public health departments and schools collaborated successfully with community groups, most notably the AIDS Committee of Toronto.
A Family Point of View: Negotiating Asylum Care in Alberta, 1905–1930
Authors: Boschma Geertje
Published: December 2016

This paper analyzes the meaning of mental illness and institutional care from a family point of view, using family correspondence and police reports about asylum admission of family members in Alberta at the beginning of the 20th century. Portraying the asylum as a place of negotiation, the analysis reveals that despite families’ lack of authority over asylum admission, they nevertheless were active participants in structuring this new form of public care once it became available in Alberta. Families negotiated and contested existing medical and legal norms that structured asylum care in order to meet their own needs and demands. Categories of age, class, gender, race, and region intersected in shaping the family experience of mental illness. The paper concludes that families expected a newly built institution to provide relief of their social problems, which was at odds with the legal and medical norms regarding asylum admission.
Les enquêtes des coroners du district de Québec, 1765–1930 : une source en histoire médicale et sociale canadienne
Authors: Lessard Rénald , Tésio Stéphanie
Published: December 2016

Créée en Angleterre en 1194, la fonction de coroner, chargé d’enquêter sur les morts violentes et suspectes, est instaurée officiellement en 1764 au Canada (Québec et Montréal). De 1765 à 1930, plus de 16 000 enquêtes sont tenues et rédigées dans le district de Québec, conservées aujourd’hui à Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Centre d’Archives de Québec. Une base de données a été créée pour faciliter l’accès à l’information pour toutes les personnes s’intéressant aux coutumes passées, à la médicalisation de la société, à l’attitude face à la mort, à la criminalité, à l’impact de l’industrialisation, aux nouveaux modes de production. Cette communication résume les éléments importants de cette base de données : l’historique de la fonction de coroner, la description de la source, et la relation entre les enquêtes des coroners et les évènements sociaux, économiques et historiques de la région de Québec.
Medicine and the Science of Soul
Authors: Hankinson R. J
Published: December 2016

Central to Don Bates’s thesis about the role of medicine in the Scientific Revolution is the Greek concept of psyche. This article explores this connection in relation to Galen. Paradoxically, Galen declined to commit himself to any particular view of the soul’s real nature, and held aloof from both materialist and Platonic positions. His medical approach, however, offered a way through these difficulties: we may not know what the soul is, but we know it exists, because we can see what it does. Medicine can also reveal other truths about the soul, such as the location of its various parts in the brain, heart and liver, or its transmission through the nerves. Different souls exhibit different “powers,” i.e., causal postulates conceived in relation to their specific effects. Thus the soul can be a proper object of scientific inquiry if one concentrates on its evident manifestations, and seeks to make causal and categorical sense of them within a general theory of functioning. Galen’s stance can be compared to some positions of Galileo, and even to La Mettrie, who claimed Galen’s support for his contention that the powers of the soul are affected by bodily conditions. Both of them concentrate on the evident facts of animal and human life; both put their considerable medical learning to work to make sense of these facts; and they shared a common aversion to dogmatism. Though Galen, unlike Galileo, would make some place for talk about substances and essences in science, he is in some respects more modern than many thinkers of the Scientific Revolution in his willingness to accommodate a wide range of modes of physical causation.
The Antiquity of the “Injunction” Non Plus Ultra
Authors: Hutchinson Keith
Published: December 2016

The latinesque phrase Non plus ultra is well-known to historians of early modern science, because its antithesis—Charles V’s imperial motto, Plus ultra—was a familiar catch-cry for the new science. But there is much confusion about the origins of these expressions. One common account supposes some version of the negative tag to have been a standard classical motto, an injunction perhaps, attached to the Pillar of Hercules. This phrase was later inverted to provide the Imperial device (so goes this explanation) and the resulting positive phrase was interpreted as celebrating colonial expansion across the Atlantic. Rosenthal, however, has convincingly undermined this whole story: the ancient motto it posits simply did not exist; the modern was coined before Charles acquired his association with America. The present work refines Rosenthal’s argument. I uncover classical sources for the early modern motto, by invoking a more satisfactory version of the inversion thesis. I agree there was no set negative adage, but insist there was a set idea, occuring repeatedly, in texts quite familiar to the Renaissance. This idea is set in contexts that display a popular Urbild of the successful conqueror, a d is eventually projected onto Alexander. So it is an ideal source for imperial propoganda.
The Road Not Taken: The 1945 Health Services Planning Commission Proposals and Physician Remuneration in Saskatchewan
Authors: Lawson Gordon S
Published: December 2016

This article examines the development of the medical services in Saskatchewan with respect to physician remuneration from 1915 to 1949. In particular, it seeks to determine why the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation government of T. C. Douglas did not follow the recommendations of its Health Services Planning Commission for the establishment of a state salaried medical service based on the province’s salaried municipal doctor system. The validity of the explanations in the established historical accounts of this policy decision is assessed based on empirical evidence. It provides a clearer understanding of how and why fee-for-service payment became entrenched in Saskatchewan Medicare.
From Bennettcare to Medicare: The Morphing of Medicare Care Insurance in British Columbia
Authors: Marchildon Gregory P , O’Byrne Nicole C
Published: December 2016

Introduced as a federal-provincial cost-sharing program in the 1960s, Canadian Medicare arose in the context of competing provincial models implemented by Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia. This article examines Bennettcare in British Columbia which, unlike the Saskatchewan and Alberta models, has never been analysed historically. Named after Premier W. A. C.Bennett, Bennettcare initially attempted to balance public support for a government- sponsored health insurance program with the free enterprise ideology espoused by the followers of Social Credit, the insurance industry, and the British Columbia Medical Association. However, in order to receive cost-sharing dollars from the federal government, Bennett was eventually compelled to change the design features in order to comply with the federal government’s requirements of universality and public administration, morphing Bennettcare into Saskatchewan-style Medicare.
L’État et l’hôpital à but lucratif au Québec, 1961–1975: une expériencedécevante de partenariat
Authors: Charles Aline , Guérard François
Published: December 2016

Une nouvelle forme de partenariat public/privé apparaît au Québec en 1961 avec le financement, en vertu de la loi de l’assurance hospitalisation, de soins donnés dans les hôpitaux à but lucratif. Quels rapports s’établissent entre l’État et les entreprises privées? Pourquoi, après une période d’expérimentation, le premier ferme-t-il la porte au développement de l’hôpital à but lucratif? Dans l’ensemble, l’expérience s’avère chaotique, inefficace, pénible. Dans les années 1970, le gouvernement semble conclure que le partenariat ne vaut pas les efforts investis. Il s’agit là d’un épisode de l’histoire hospitalière aujourd’hui largement oublié, alors même que des enjeux similaires resurgissent.
Nursing History for the Net Generation
Authors: Buckingham Stephanie
Published: December 2016

This article describes the development and delivery of an online history of nursing course. The course enables learners to take an in-depth look at the rich and complex history of nursing in Canada and gain an understanding of nurses’ influence on society and the contributions nurses have made to building this country, as well as to the health of Canadians. The paper examines the pedagogy of teaching and learning on the web and the implications of a technologically savvy generation of learners. The article outlines some of the course highlights, including an overview of a variety of innovative, interactive learning objects, used to enhance knowledge and stimulate discussion. As the first online history of nursing course in Canada, we have taught some history, learned some history and, perhaps, we even made some history.
Surgeons Reconsidered: Military Medical Men of the American Revolution
Authors: Marshall Tabitha
Published: December 2016

This paper assesses the reputation of British military medical staff in the 18th century, focusing on the character and professionalism ofregimental surgeons and mates who served at the time of the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783). Examining the careers and contributions of men such as Thomas Dickson Reide, Robert Jackson, and Robert Hamilton reveals that—in contrast to charges of ineptitude, laziness anddishonesty among military surgeons—the British army could count on a cadre of military medical men who were devoted both to their patientsand to the advancement of their profession.
Questioning Medicine in Seventeenth-Century Rome: The Consultations of Paolo Zacchia
Authors: Duffin Jacalyn
Published: December 2016

This paper surveys the life and contributions of Paolo Zacchia (15841659) before analyzing 85 Latin consilia (or consultations) in his Quaestiones medico-legales. Topics include death, paternity, sexuality, disease, and miracles. Because the consilia cite the rest of his treatise, they open the entire work, elucidating applications of theory. This research relied on the construction of a database, built on subject, date, and citations. The paper closes with historiographic suggestions for why this prominent author has been ignored in North America.
An Illness in the Family: Dr. Maude Abbott and Her Sister, Alice Abbott
Authors: Brookes Barbara
Published: December 2016

This paper explores Maude Abbott's internationally significant career in medicine and her parallel commitment to caring for her sister, Alice Abbott. An examination of Abbott's life reveals the difficulties faced by an ambitious Canadian woman in medicine from the 1890s to the 1920s; difficulties compounded by caring for a sister with a mental illness. The Abbott archive suggests that it was far more difficult for a woman doctor to make the kind of sharp distinction between public and private life that might be expected of professional men.
The AMS/Paterson Lecture: Becoming Alternative? Modern Transformations of Chinese Medicine in China and in the United States
Authors: Furth Charlotte
Published: December 2016

Becoming Alternative offers an overview of the transformations of Chinese medicine at home and abroad since the mid-19th century. After coming into contact with biomedicine, China's indigenous medicine was redefined in terms of national culture and history on the one hand, and a competitive alternative science on the other. Reimagined in terms of scientific syncretism in the PRC, and embraced as a counter-cultural alternative to bio-medicine in the United States, the medicine we call "Chinese" today emerges as a pluralistic system with global reach involving complex accommodations with local medical cultures and institutions both at home and abroad.
Sport (and Exercise) Medicine in Britain: Healthy Citizens and Abnormal Athletes
Authors: Heggie Vanessa
Published: December 2016

Historians have not so far considered Britain as a pioneer in sports medicine, instead arguing that an amateur ethos retarded developments in science and medicine. This article demonstrates that Britain institutionalized and formally recognized sport (and exercise) medicine in advance of most other nations. Further, its sports medicine grew from a focus on elite, competitive and professional sports and not—as had been the case for other countries—on school sports and exercise for health. An interest in the amateur athlete appeared only after 1970, the result of increased government intervention in national fitness and new theories in public health.
Exercising Caution: The Production of Medical Knowledge about PhysicalExertion during Pregnancy
Authors: Jette Shannon
Published: December 2016

In this article I explore the production of medical knowledge about exercise during pregnancy in the latter half of the 20th century, illustrating how debates about the safe limits of maternal exercise were rooted in longstanding anxieties surrounding the female reproductive body as well as epistemological questions concerning what counts as knowledge or evidence in the scientific realm. By drawing to the surface the "rules of formation" for the production of knowledge about the pregnant body, I aim to bring to light the contingent nature of this knowledge—never neutral but always bound up in relations of power.
The Social Integration of the Mentally Ill in Quebec Prior to the Bédard Report of 1962
Authors: Thifault Marie-Claude
Published: December 2016

This article on the first initiatives of social integration of the mentally ill, using the example of Saint-Jean-de-Dieu Hospital, explores the implementation of dehopsitalization (the transition between hospital and community care) in the early decades of the 20th century. Our study is part of the recent historiographical stream that offers are interpretation of the period just prior to the Quiet Revolution inQuebec. We aim to contribute to this research by showing that the policies, strategies, and practices of the Sisters of Providence and the psychiatrists of Saint-Jean-de-Dieu already comprised a deinstitutionalization system that was reintegrating patients into their families as early as the 1910s—half a century before the first wave of deinstitutionalization of the 1960s was orchestrated by the authors of theBédard Report.
Aspirations éthiques et réalité de la pratique médicale à la fin de l’Ancien Régime
Authors: Louis-Courvoisier Micheline
Published: December 2016

La survie économique était difficile pour les médecins de la fin du 18e siècle. Trop nombreux, en concurrence avec les autres soignants, ils devaient soigner leur apparence pour acquérir une bonne réputation et se faire une clientèle. Une attention particulière à leur habillement et à leur moyen de transport participaient à l’établissement dela réputation de « bon » docteur et devait leur permettre d’attirer un réseau de patients suffisant. Toutefois, ce réseau ne pas encore lasécurité financière du médecin et de sa famille. Encore fallait-il, à une époque où les tarifs médicaux commencent à être discutés seulement, savoir sur quels critères rédiger la facture de ses honoraires, et comment se faire payer par leurs malades. A cette même époque parurent les premiers textes imprimés sur les recommandations éthiques médicales, qui insistent sur la modestie, la délicatesse, l’authenticit et la sincérité. Cet article, par la confrontation entre archives personnelles et prescriptions éthiques, montre les tensions qui existent entre les difficultés quotidiennes de la pratique médicale et les recommandations éthiques, tensions qui ont des conséquences sur la relation thérapeutique.
“Citizens Useful to Their Country and to Humanity”: The Convergence of Eugenics and Pro-Natalism in Interwar French Politics, 1918–1940
Authors: Read Geoff
Published: December 2016

Interwar France witnessed a convergence of two ostensibly diametrically opposed phenomena: eugenics and pro-natalism. In the 1930s in particular, pro-natalists, desiring to raise the French birthrate, and eugenicists, pursuing racial hygiene, came together both literally and discursively, allowing them to exercise a high degree of influence on politics and policy. In this manner, although France did not conduct a campaign of sterilization as did many other countries, eugenics influenced the formation of the French welfare state nonetheless, suggesting that historians should reassess their interpretation of its origins.
Russian physicians and medical politics in the Revolution of 1917.
Authors: Hutchinson John F
Published: December 2016

Alone among the major upheavals of modern European history, the Russian Revolution of 1917 has yet to be tackled by historians of medicine outside the Soviet Union. The interplay between medicine and revolution in London in the 1640’s, Philadelphia in the l780’s, Paris in the 1790’s, Berlin in 1848 and again in 1919 has received, and continues to receive, a good deal of attention; why not Petrograd and Moscow in 1917? True, many scholars are aware of the politicization which marked the Russian medical profession in tsarist times—reflected especially in the resolutions of the Pirogov Society's famous “Cholera Congress” in 1905—but few can say anything of substance about the aspirations, tactics, and involvement of physicians in the revolutionary events of 1917. Indeed, for those who do not know Russian, there is so little to read that the present situation verges on a historiographic scandal.
The medical view of women: the case of the late nineteenth century Canada.
Authors: Mitchinson Wendy
Published: December 2016

Historians in recent years have become interested in the medical treatment meted out to women, particularly in the mid-to-late nineteenth century when gynecology developed as a medical specialty. Not surprisingly, studies have linked medical therapeutics and medical concepts of biological woman to practitioners' sociological perceptions of women. Late nineteenth-century society stressed the differences between the two sexes more than their similarities and it was this focus which directed physicians in their professional endeavours. In addition, given the complexity of their reproductive system, women were more challenging as patients than men and thus attracted more medical attention. This resulted in a large body of medical literature on women which reinforced the already existing belief that the differences between the sexes were more significant than the similarities.
Beyond the book: Charles Singer and Anglo-Saxon medicine revisited.
Authors: Denton Peter
Published: December 2016

Living in a literate culture tends to make us think that literacy is a prerequisite for “culture”. To be illiterate in the twentieth century is to be considered socially inferior, especially in a society which purports to value verbal skills so highly. Our perceptions of past oral cultures are tainted by this prejudice toward literacy; to literacy is attributed the intellectual stature we associate with western civilization. People who cannot read or write are presumed unable to think as well.
Medical Genetics at McGill: The History of a Pioneering Research Group
Authors: Canning Christopher , Weisz George , Tone Andrea , Cambrosio Alberto
Published: December 2016

The McGill Group in Medical Genetics was formed in 1972, supported by the Medical Research Council and successor Canadian Institutes for Health Research until September 2009, making it the longest active biomedical research group in the history of Canada. We document the history of the McGill Group and situate its research within a broader history of medical genetics. Drawing on original oral histories with the Group’s members, surviving documents, and archival materials, we explore how the Group’s development was structured around epistemological trends in medical genetics, policy choices made by research agencies, and the development of genetics at McGill University and its hospitals.