bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Archives et artefacts de la pratique médicale: La conceptualisation anatomo-clinique de la tuberculose pulmonaire dans l’oeuvre de Laennec
Authors: Hamraoui Eric
Published: December 2016

The present study discusses the description of the tubercules of the lung which appeared in the 1826 edition of the treatise De l’auscultation médiate (1819) by Laennec, the author with Bayle of the first anatomo-clinical conceptualisation of pulmonary tuberculosis. Employing the analytical framework developed by Othmar Keel, the study investigates the interrelationships between two contemporaneous modes of interpreting the pathological evidence—the localist vision and the anatomo-pathological conception—in order to understand the influences of the surgical model upon the progress of anatomical, physiopathological, and tissue investigations by researchers such as Hunter and Bichat.
“Their Lack of Masculine Security and Aggression Was Obvious”: Gender and the Medicalization of Inebriety in the United States, 1930–50
Authors: Patnode Stephen
Published: December 2016

This article examines the roles of gender and sexuality in the public and private debate over medicalizing inebriety in the United States from 193050. During this period various interest groups wrestled with two competing visions of how to frame chronic drinking, which came to be labelled alcoholism following the repeal of Prohibition. Mainstream doctors and psychiatrists agreed that the underlying cause of alcoholism was in the mind of the individual. A number of psychiatrists went further, suggesting a connection between alcoholism and latent homosexuality. In contrast, laypeople identifying themselves as alcoholics advanced a second, competing vision of alcoholism that framed it as a blameless physiological illness. This second understanding of alcoholism, particularly as promoted by members of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), emphasized the need for restoring heteronormative gender roles for alcoholics (who were generally men) and their spouses (who were generally women) as an important step to recovery.

Indeed, this may help to explain the success of AA and its medicalization model in the US from 1930–50, as both built upon widely held cultural assumptions concerning gender roles and sexuality.
Politiques internationales (et réponses locales) de santé au Brésil : le Service Spécial de Santé Publique, 1942–1960
Authors: Campos Andre Luiz Vieira De
Published: December 2016

Cet article analyse le Service Spécial de Santé Publique (SESP), une agence américano-brésilienne créée en 1942. Idealisée par les États-Unis en tant qu’organisation temporaire de guerre, les interactions et réponses brésiliennes à ces activités ont fait du SESP un instrument de l’expansion de l’autorité de l’État national. Après 1945, le SESP a réorienté ses buts et est devenu une organisation structurée composée d’un réseau horizontal et permanent d’unités sanitaires, liées aux projets de développement de l’État brésilien. Malgré leur caractère international, les politiques sanitaires du SESP, n’ont pas été seulement l’importation d’un modèle américain au Brésil mais ont été aussi des projets marqués par des adaptations à la réalité locale.
Identifying Victims: Child Abuse and Death in Canadian Families
Authors: Mennill Sally
Published: December 2016

This study examines the murder and abuse of children in Canada in the context of the commonplace of much violence and death and explores the shifting response of observers over more than a century. A review of the cases of three children who died at the hands of their caregivers in the late 20th century exposes mainstream and official preoccupation with the failures of individuals and of welfare systems rather than with the systemic disadvantage experienced by mothers and children alike.
Every Generation Has Its War: Representations of Gay Men with AIDS and Their Parents in the United States, 1983–1993
Authors: Murray Heather
Published: December 2016

This article explores how the relationship between gay men with AIDS and their parents was imagined and represented in both gay and more mainstream literary and visual sources. While some observers of AIDS in late twentieth-century America have suggested that gay men looked to peer caring networks as an alternative kinship strategy, I argue here that the disease also overlapped the social lives, experiences, and cultures of gay men and their heterosexual parents. Portraits of this relationship suggest a mutual generational longing for the family and the basic acts of care and nurturance that it seemed to embody
Constructing Medical Social Authority on Dress in Victorian Canada
Authors: O'Connor Eileen
Published: December 2016

During the late-Victorian period, campaigns to “reform” middle-class women’s dress were grounded in discourses on health, eugenics, declining birth rates, comfort, and aesthetics. In Britain, the United States and Germany, organized “dress reform” movements emerged in the latter half of the 19th century, while in Canada the campaign was led primarily by physicians through public health education. This article explores the discussion on women’s dress in public health literature in Canadian circulation between 1860-1900 and interprets findings within a feminist poststructuralist framework that posits the understanding of women’s bodies and gender regulation to be central to knowledge construction on women’s dress.
Dominique-Jean Larrey, Chief Surgeon of the French Army with Napoleon in Egypt: Notes and Observations on Larrey’s Medical Memoirs Based on the Egyptian Campaign
Authors: Wood Mary Mendenhall
Published: December 2016

Dr. Dominique-Jean Larrey wrote memoirs of 12 diseases he encountered while serving as chief surgeon of the French army during Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign. He describes symptoms and treatments, evaluates remedies used by the Egyptians, and the effects of the climate. Of interest are his original though misguided explanations of causes of sickness or complications from wounds as well as descriptions of medications—now known to be dangerous— but all balanced by his common sense and efforts to ameliorate suffering.
The Epistemological Aspects in the Historical Works of Don Bates; For Don, from one unremitting Kuhnian to another
Authors: De Camargo Kenneth Rochel
Published: December 2016

The object of this paper is to systematize an epistemological framework of analysis derived from Don Bates’s extended essay “Medicine and The Soul of Science,” and apply that framework to a number of problems connected to medical knowledge, addressed in previous research by the author. The paper also draws from Bates’s earlier work, especially the two-part “Closing the Circle” on William Harvey and the reception of his ideas by his contemporaries, and from contrasting and comparing it to the work of philosophers and historians of science who tackled similar problems, most notably Ludwik Fleck, Thomas Kuhn, and Ian Hacking. The resulting framework is based on three main concepts: constructed coherencing, the unproblematic background knowledge (UBK), and the mechanical mind. The paper closes with an application of that framework to the discussion of knowledge in medicine and the definition of diseases.
La Mettrie’s Soul: Vertigo, Fever, Massacre, and The Natural History
Authors: Hacking Ian
Published: December 2016

La Mettrie’s materialist and monistic philosophy is that of a military doctor, knowing what dysentery did to his own mind, watching his regiment destroyed at Fontenoy, running French field hospitals in Flanders. He learned brain science in the injuries of his fellows. He knew pain and that man’s main positive drive was sex. He despised the prudish hypocrisies of feeble materialists like Diderot and Voltaire. His brutal military life and his hedonism made him the most coherent monist against Cartesian dualism. His study of vertigo is sound clinical medicine, which well accords with one trend in today’s medical practice.
Organic Mechanism and the Soul of Science
Authors: Wilson Catherine
Published: December 2016

One of Donald Bates's most striking claims was that the bio-medical sciences were central to the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century and that its innovators drew heavily on the "organic mechanism" of the ancients. The paper elaborates on and defends Bates's proposal against a more conventional reading of the Scientific Revolution as driven by celestial and terrestrial mechanics and physics.
Into Thin Air: Making National Health Policy, 1939–45
Authors: MacDougall Heather
Published: December 2016

From 1939-1945, Dr. J. J. Heagerty, the long-serving federal Director of ]Public Health Services, championed a national health insurance program which ]united curative and preventive services while avoiding the pitfalls of “state ]medicine.” But his carefully designed plan was stymied by internal and external ]opposition. As Keynesian economics and central planning became dominant ]during the war, line departments were ignored or undercut in spite of growing ]public support for social welfare programs. Instead, health insurance was subsumed ]in the 1945 reconstruction proposals for political reasons and Heagerty’s ]comprehensive vision foundered when the conference failed.
The Hoadley Commission (1932–34) and Health Insurance in Alberta
Authors: Lampard Robert
Published: December 2016

The role of Albertans in the evolution of health insurance in Canada, and particularly the Hoadley Commission, has been overlooked and assumed to be non-contributory. The Commission proposed for the first time that all citizens be insured, and the provincial government would pay for those who could not afford the premiums. The proposed plan was to be centrally administrated by a government-appointed commission. The Commission’s principles were supported by the AMA/CPSA in 1932 and incorporated into the CMA’s health insurance plan between 1934 and 1935. The proposal stimulated the first Blue Cross plan in Canada in Edmonton in 1934. It was supported by the Social Credit government, who in 1942 re-passed the UFA Health Insurance Act of 1935. The Act meshed perfectly with the federal Heagerty Advisory Committee proposal of 1943.
Part III: Oral History and the Birth of Medicare: Witnesses to Medicare in Saskatchewan: Medicare Workshop at the University of Saskatchewan—Wednesday, 20 May 2007: The Struggle to Implement Medicare
Authors: Blakeney Allan
Published: December 2016

Allan Blakeney reminisces on the public relations battle launched by the Saskatchewan College of Physicians and Surgeons, and fuelled by most local media, when the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) government passed legislation in 1961 to deliver on their election promise of a province-wide single-payer medical care insurance plan, the provincial forerunner of Medicare in Canada. Blakeney details the major events leading to the doctors’ strike and recalls the role of some major players on both sides of the conflict. Blakeney highlights strategies conceived by the CCF to cope with the potential and realized eventualities of the doctors’ strike.
My Experience in the Medicare Battle and the Woods Commission
Authors: Romanow Roy
Published: December 2016

“I don’t go around saying how bad they are or interfere with how they do business, I just try and do better than them and that is what I think you should do.” He got us our privileges. However, we were not quite out of the woods. Just before Christmas of 1966, Dr. Samuel Wolfe, our clinic’s medical director, received a summons from the College of Physicians and Surgeons to appear before the Disciplinary Committee charged with unprofessional conduct for unethical advertising. The cause was a pamphlet that the Community Health Association had published entitled, “How to Use the Clinic,” that described the services, hours of operation, and other details. Every member patient would receive a copy of this. One had been lying on the bed of a clinic patient in hospital when it was seen by one of our opponents who took it to the College. Our lawyer applied for an injunction against the College for their attempt to act against the physicians for something done by another party, i.e., the Saskatoon Community Clinic. That injunction has never been answered.
A Brief Retrospective on the Royal Commission on Health Services
Authors: Boan Jack
Published: December 2016

In many parts of Canada, but categorically not in Saskatchewan, Justice Emmett Hall is thought to be the father of Medicare. This is because the enlightened solution to the provision of medical services that we enjoy came as the result of the recommendation of the Royal Commission on Health Services of which Hall was the Chairman. There is another reason to introduce Hall in this setting: he and Tommy Douglas were good friends. To illustrate this, Fr. Anthony Hall, his young brother, told a cute story at the inaugural Justice Emmett Hall Memorial Lecture, in 1997. It seems that Tommy was in the Civic Hospital, and Emmett was in town on business, and asked to be driven to the hospital to see Tommy. Father Hall said, “I waited outside in the car, and, when Emmett came out he was chuckling, so I asked him  why are you so happy? And he told me that Tommy was asleep when he went into the room, but, the patient in the other bed  said go ahead, wake him up, he won’t mind. So, Emmett woke him up and then Tommy Douglas exploded in astonishment and said, ‘so, you’re here too, Emmett.I’m in heaven that’s what I’m dreaming about, but how did you get here?’”
Shifting Focus: Medicare, Canadian Historians, and New Research Directions
Authors: MacDougall Heather
Published: December 2016

This article urges Canadian historians to undertake research into the many neglected aspects of the origin and evolution of Canadian Medicare. As a visible component of civic ideology and national identity, Medicare illustrates not only the nation-building aspects of the welfare state but also the ongoing redefinition of federal/provincial/territorial relations, the power of region, class and gender, and the need for historical understanding of the roots of contemporary healthcare problems to aid politicians, bureaucrats and the public in making critical policy decisions now and in the future.
A Cup Full of Domesticity: The “Duke-Fingard” Vaporizer
Authors: Schwartz Mallory
Published: December 2016

This article presents the history of the “Duke-Fingard” domestic medical vaporizer. It considers the emergence of this Canadian device out of Rudolph Duke and David Fingard’s larger institutional inhalation treatment system, and seeks to trace and explain the medical, social, commercial and cultural influences that shaped its subsequent sale, use of electricity, and design. What emerges through this synchronic and microhistorical analysis is a more concrete sense of the practice of domestic medicine during a transformative period of Canadian medical history.
The American Nursing Shortage during World War I: The Debate over the Use of Nurses’ Aids
Authors: Telford Jennifer Casavant
Published: December 2016

This article explores the history of the creation of the Army and Navy Female Nurse Corps and the debate that ensued between American nursing leaders Jane Delano, director of the Red Cross Nursing Service, M. Adelaide Nutting, president of the American Federation of Nurses, and Annie Goodrich, dean of the Army School of Nursing, over the use of untrained nurses’ aids to offset the nursing shortage that resulted from the United States entry into the Great War in 1917. The recruitment of minimally or untrained nurses’ aids to offset the nursing shortage of the World War I era was a logical solution for American nursing leaders who had to meet the needs for nursing personnel. The exclusion of trained African American nurses, however, was a gross oversight on the part of these leaders. Whether or not this action compromised the status of nursing as a profession is still a matter of interest. Moreover, the debate about the delivery of care by unlicensed personnel continues.
Military Medicine and the Ethics of War: British Colonial Warfare during the Seven Years War (1756–63)
Authors: Charters Erica
Published: December 2016

This article examines 18th-century European warfare, tracing the first formal codifications of conventions of war, frequently introduced by military physicians and initially regarding the treatment of thesick and wounded.It outlines to what extent these conventions were followed in practice, particularly in the challenging environment of American irregular warfare, with a focus on the most well-known incident of “biological warfare” in the period: the deliberate spread of smallpox by British officers among Amerindians in 1763. More broadly, it demonstrates that the history of military medicine provides a fruitful method with which to uncover assumptions about the ethics of war.
Medicine and the Egyptian Campaign: The Development of the Military Medical Officer during the Napoleonic Wars c. 1798–1801
Authors: Kelly Catherine
Published: December 2016

This article investigates how French and British army medical officers in Egypt at the turn of the 19th century were affected by campaign experiences. Their encounters with ophthalmia, plague, and other diseases influenced the practice of medicine in later campaigns and fostered the development of the idea amongst military practitioners that military diseases required specialised knowledge. Practitioners’ campaign writings are used to demonstrate how British army doctors approached the investigation of the “new” diseases they encountered. In particular, the article focuses on how Dr. James McGrigor used the military system to control, direct, and disseminate the development of medical knowledge.
Lost in Transition: Influenza in the British Army in the 1830s and 1840s
Authors: Padiak Janet , Herring D. Ann
Published: December 2016

This paper uses surgeons’ reports from the 1830s and 1840s to investigate routine regimental medical care by focusing on a familiar, non-fatal disease. The regimental reports are used to describe the classification of influenza and the use of antiphlogistic regimen to treat thedisease. Also discussed is how the surgeons reconciled the rapid spread of influenza with the predominant causation beliefs of the time. Furthermore, the patterns of influenza morbidity in the early middle 19th century are discussed, adding to the understanding of the historical epidemiology of this genetically variable virus.
The Role of the Irish Division of the Royal Medico-PsychologicalAssociation in the Development of Intellectual Disability Nursing in Ireland
Authors: Sweeney J.F
Published: December 2016

The development of a specialist intellectual disability workforce in independent Ireland by the Royal Medico-Psychological Association was influenced by nursing regulatory bodies and Catholic religious orders, the latter of which provided lay residential education to people with intellectual disabilities. Although the RMPA shaped curriculum and examinations, practice scope, clinical assessment and practical skills were weighted more heavily towards bedside nursing, psychology and education due to the input of the religious orders and nursing board.
Abandoning Nature: Swimming Pools and Clean, Healthy Recreation in Hamilton, Ontario, c. 1930s–1950s
Authors: Bouchier Nancy B , Cruikshank Ken
Published: December 2016

Municipal swimming pools arose as a technological fix for an urban public health and recreation crisis in Hamilton when its bay became a polluted sink for residential and industrial wastes. Until World War II, city leaders and medical authorities believed that they could identify, delineate, and construct safe natural swimming areas along the bay's shore, supplemented by a few public artificial swimming pools. After the war, the pollution situation worsened. For those who couldn't travel to cleaner lakeshores elsewhere, local authorities created swimming pools, thus abandoning the natural waters of the bay to the "constructive power of the profit motive."
A Healthy Anniversary? Exploring Narratives of Health in Media Coverage of the 1968 and 2008 Olympic Games
Authors: Safai Parissa
Published: December 2016

Researchers are increasingly examining the tenuous relationship between participation in high performance sport and health, and yet IOC-sanctioned and popular discourse around the Olympics remains replete with references to the supposed healthfulness of the Games. Using the 1968 Mexico City Games and the 2008 Bejing Games as bookends, this paper explores national and international media coverage of athletic performance in relation to health and well-being. Three central narratives emerged: (1) pain, perseverance, and the pervasiveness of the "culture of risk" in high performance sport; (2) the performance imperative in the face of the challenges and anxieties of the environment; and (3) the presence and emerging sophistication of sports sciences/scientists in determining health.
Social, Motivational, and Symptomatic Diversity: An Analysis of the Patient Population of the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital, 1913–1917
Authors: Lamb Susan
Published: December 2016

In the five years after the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic opened in 1913 at Johns Hopkins, its 88 beds were consistently in high demand. Exploiting the biographical information and the particularly descriptive medical narratives in the hospital records of Phipps patients, this study explores the social composition of the patient population, the various avenues by which patients were admitted, and the decision-making processes of families and communities confronting the vicissitudes of mental illness. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of all admissions between 1913 and 1917 reveal that, contrary to scholarly myth, this population was highly diverse socially, motivationally, and symptomatically.
The Development of Forensic Pathology in London, England: Keith Simpson and the Dobkin Case, 1942
Authors: Bell Amy
Published: December 2016

During the Second World War in London, the bombing raids targeting civilians led to a greater public reliance on forensic pathologists. Hospitals used their skills to identify the victims of raids and determine their cause of death, though many bomb victims were never identified. The public reputation of forensic pathology was enhanced by Dr. Keith Simpson’s 1942 identification of a body found in a bombed church as the missing Mrs. Dobkin, murdered by her husband and hidden in the rubble. The devastation wrought by the Blitz was countered by this public display of the collaboration between forensic pathology and wartime authorities desperate to maintain order.
On Ideas as Actors: How Ideas about Yellow Fever Causality Shaped Public Health Policy Responses in 19th-Century Galveston
Authors: Goldberg Daniel S
Published: December 2016

This article uses debates regarding yellow fever causality among leading healers in 19th-century Galveston, Texas, U.S., as a means of exploring the extent to which ideas are social actors. That is, the analysis demonstrates that ideas about yellow fever causality shaped contemporaneous public health policy responses to yellow fever outbreaks in 19th-century Galveston. The article contributes to the growing literature documenting that contagionist and anticontagionist views were often assimilated, and also supports the historiography showing that the predisposing/exciting causes dichotomy is a more robust intellectual framework for understanding 19th-century attributions of disease causality.
In defense of the King's domain: disease prevention and health care in the Spanish Maritime Expeditions to the North Pacific, 1774–1795
Authors: Archer Christon I
Published: December 2016

At first glance, it would appear that eighteenth century Spain occupied an excellent strategic position to maintain its theoretical hold over the Pacific and to meet challenges from foreign competitors who had to sail half way round the world or to overcome daunting obstacles before they could begin to threaten the Spanish monopoly. Indeed, until well into the second half of the century, Spain evaded the heavy expenditures required to dispatch naval expeditions to delineate the North Pacific littoral of the American continent. Until the 1770’s, there were few urgent pressures to complete the North American map or to defend the coastline from intruders who might wish to construct bases, tap resources, and to establish ties with the indigenous populations. When challengers emerged, however, Spain had to face a whole series of assaults against its sovereignty which had been based upon the concept of prior claim and not on actual exploration and effective occupation. Russia moved into Alaska from its Siberian bases and appeared ready to strike southward into the immediate proximity of the sparsely inhabited California missions. Britain, France, and other nations expressed new enthusiasm for discovering a Northwest Passage and settling once and for all the apocryphal myths that influenced cartography. Following the American Revolution, the upstart young republic began to dispatch exploring-trading missions that cast fear into the hearts of Spanish administrators knowledgeable about the enormous unsettled territories at the frontier of the Mexican dominions. Finally, there were dynamic new forces transforming the world—scientific curiosity and an unquenchable thirst to learn and to answer mysteries that would leave no great temperate region unvisited. The third voyage of Captain James Cook to the Pacific and Northwest Coast served as a catalyst to international activities that forced a major Spanish presence.
An English-language bibliography of classical Greek medicine.
Authors: Connor J.T.H
Published: December 2016

The merit of a bibliography lies not in its originality, but in its utility. Thus, readers should be satisfied to find the present list useful: its 300 entries embrace the majority of the standard and recent scholarly literature in English about classical Greek medicine. Appended is a short section containing selected sources in French, German, Spanish, and Italian, all of which include extensive bibliographies of their own, as, by the way, do many of the works cited in the main bibliography; for example, Drabkin (1942); Harris (1973); Leitner (1973); Lloyd (1983); Lonie (1981); Sarton (1927); Smith (1979); and Temkin (1967).
«Polio Hysteria» : La rentrée scolaire montréalaise de 1946 et l’épidémie de poliomyélite
Authors: Poirier Valérie
Published: December 2016

Lors de l’épidémie de poliomyélite à Montréal en 1946, la remise de la rentrée scolaire est rapidement devenue un débat public, qui permet d’observer les discours de plusieurs acteurs sociaux qui tentent d’imposer leur autorité dans la gestion de l’épidémie. Cet article rappelle la persistance des jugements des autorités scolaires et médicales quant à la capacité des parents à prendre soin de la santé de leurs enfants, de même qu’il met en lumière le renforcement des parents en tant qu’intervenants sociaux au sein du Québec d’après-guerre. Appréhendée dans son contexte plus large, cette étude de cas permet également d’explorer la valorisation de l’enfance dans la société des années 1940 et de l’immédiat après-guerre.
Too Many Doctors? Foreign Medical Graduates and the Debate over Health Care Accessibility in Canada, c.1976–1991
Authors: Clarke John , Wright David
Published: December 2016

Although the last decade has been dominated by commentators lamenting the national shortage of medical practitioners, only a generation ago policy makers concluded that most Canadian provinces had too many doctors. As a consequence, provincial ministers of health placed new restrictions on the licensing of foreign-trained health professionals. Assisted by the 1976 Immigration Act, Canada suddenly witnessed a precipitous drop in the number of newly licensed, foreign-trained doctors, a dramatic reversal of the previous decade which had seen over 10,000 physicians immigrate and take up practice in this country. The 1980s was notable for a variety of health care initiatives aimed at relocating the diminishing number of foreign physicians to underserviced areas, some of which were struck down as contravening the new Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This paper will examine the period of 1976-91, when, after two decades of relatively liberal immigration and licencing policies, Canadian provinces introduced new measures to restrict the scope of practice of incoming foreign-trained doctors and to divert them to underserviced areas. The paper will explore these health policy debates in order to understand better the context of the landmark Barer-Stoddart Report (1991), which concluded that a new interprofessional mix of health care practitioners was needed to reform, and make more accessible, the Canadian health care system.
Persuader et contraindre. Les campagnes de souscription de l’Hôpital Sainte-Justine de Montréal, 1928–1950
Authors: Baillargeon Denyse
Published: December 2016

Entre 1928 et 1950, l’Hôpital Sainte-Justine pour enfants de Montréal a tenu chaque année une campagne de souscription publique visant à réduire son déficit d’opération. Au-delà de ce qu’elle peut nous apprendre au sujet des modes de financement de cet hôpital, cette initiative apparaît comme un cas intéressant de « régulation morale » qui mérite d’être analysé comme tel. Les sources relatives à l’organisation des campagnes annuelles de Sainte-Justine montrent en effet que pour obtenir l’appui du public, l’hôpital a dû créer un sentiment d’obligation envers les petits malades en s’engageant dans une vaste entreprise d’éducation populaire qui n’excluait pas une certaine part de contrainte. Après avoir brièvement examiné les circonstances qui ont amené Sainte-Justine à faire appel au public sur une base régulière, le présent texte s’attarde à la rhétorique puis à l’organisation matérielle des collectes de fonds de Sainte-Justine de manière à montrer comment ces deux dimensions se sont combinées pour modifier la conception que la population montréalaise se faisait de sa responsabilité envers les enfants et l’amener à puiser dans ses goussets, assurant ainsi leur réussite, du moins pour la période considérée ici.
Medical History in Canadian Undergraduate Medical Education, 1939-2012
Authors: Fuller Jonathan , Olszewski Margaret M
Published: December 2016

The virtues of learning medical history for medical students have long been argued. Surveys of Canadian medical schools were done in 1939, 1968, and 1999 to discover details about the inclusion of medical history in undergraduate medical education (UME). In 2012, we completed our own survey. While medical history is more commonly included in the core UME curriculum now than in the past, half of Canada’s schools still do not require it. An analysis of trends over time reveals the central importance of longstanding and emergent prejudices and cultural influences as barriers to more widespread inclusion of medical history.
Entre bienfaisance, contrôle des populations et agenda international: la politique sanitaire du mandat français en Syrie et au Liban
Authors: Chiffoleau Sylvia
Published: December 2016

Au Levant, les mandats ne sétablissent pas sur un espace vierge, mais héritent dune situation sanitaire déjà mûre et complexe dont ils doivent tenir compte. Laction sanitaire du mandat français au Liban et en Syrie sinscrit ainsi au carrefour dune médecine de bienfaisance, qui sappuie sur un réseau dense dinstitutions de soin privées et communautaires, et dune médecine sécuritaire de défense contre les épidémies, dans la continuité de lhistoire de la santé publique internationale dans la région. Lutte contre les flambées de paludisme ou de choléra, sécurisation sanitaire de la route terrestre du pèlerinage à La Mecque constituent les axes majeurs dune politique de santé marquée par la pénurie, de moyens financiers plus que dhommes, et qui sest montrée incapable délaborer un projet social et sanitaire denvergure
Sterilization and Birth Control in the Shadow of Eugenics: Married, Middle-Class Women in Alberta, 1930–1960s
Authors: Dyck Erika
Published: December 2016

The history of eugenic sterilization connotes draconian images of coerced and involuntary procedures robbing men and women of their reproductive health. While eugenics programs often fit this characterization, there is another, smaller, and less obvious legacy of eugenics that arguably contributed to a more empowering image of reproductive health. Sexual sterilization surgeries as a form of contraception began to gather momentum alongside eugenics programs in the middle of the 20th century and experiences among prairie women serve as an illustrative example. Alberta maintained its eugenics program from 1929 to 1972 and engaged in thousands of eugenic sterilizations, but by the 1940s middle-class married women pressured their Albertan physicians to provide them with sterilization surgeries to control fertility, as a matter of choice. The multiple meanings and motivations behind this surgery introduced a moral quandary for physicians, which encourages medical historians to revisit the history of eugenics and its relationship to the contemporaneous birth control movement.
Eugenics and Racial Biology in Sweden and the USSR: Contacts across the Baltic Sea
Authors: Rudling Per Anders
Published: December 2016

The 1920s saw a significant exchange between eugenicists in Sweden and the young Soviet state. Sweden did not take part in World War I, and during the years following immediately upon the Versailles peace treaty, Swedish scholars came to serve as an intermediary link between, on the one hand, Soviet Russia and Weimar Germany, and, on the other hand, Western powers. Swedish eugenicists organized conferences, lecture tours, visits, scholarly exchanges, and transfers and translation of eugenic research. Herman Lundborg, the director of the world’s first State Institute of Racial Biology, was an old-fashioned, deeply conservative, and anti-communist “scientific” racist, who somewhat paradoxically came to serve as something of a Western liaison for Soviet eugenicists. Whereas the contacts were disrupted in 1930, Swedish eugenicists had a lasting impact on Soviet physical anthropologists, who cited their works well into the 1970s, long after they had been discredited in Sweden.
“A midwife at every confinement”: Midwifery and Medicalized Childbirth in Ontario and Britain, 1920–1950
Authors: CROSS GWENITH SIOBHAN
Published: December 2016

This paper compares midwifery in Ontario and Britain in the first half of the 20th century. British midwives improved maternal and infant health and welfare by making childbirth a cooperative, medically managed event in conjunction with physicians. British midwives thus participated in, and contributed to, developments in obstetrics. In contrast, Ontario physicians worked to exclude midwives from participation in the modernization of birth management, relying on a narrower concept of “medicalization” defined as physician dominance. This study challenges the medical profession’s assumptions that the exclusion of midwifery in Ontario was necessary to the medicalization of childbirth. The British alternative, where midwives were seen as partners rather than obstacles, illustrates that medicalization in the interest of infant and maternal safety could be integrated with the work of midwives.
What’s a Guy To Do?: Contraceptive Responsibility, Confronting Masculinity, and the History of Vasectomy in Canada
Authors: SHROPSHIRE SARAH
Published: December 2016

Despite the growing popularity of vasectomy in recent years, historians have largely ignored the history of the procedure. The current article provides a preliminary examination of voluntary male sterilization in Canada and, in so doing, challenges the gendered paradigm scholars have often applied to the history of contraception. State-sponsored Medicare and late decriminalization of contraception are discussed as factors that slowed widespread adoption of vasectomy in Canada while evolving surgical techniques are highlighted for their role in increasing acceptability of the procedure. The article explores how evolving definitions of hegemonic masculinity have both hindered and encouraged acceptance of vasectomy over time.
Ideal Births and Ideal Babies: English-Canadian Advice Literature in the 1950s and 1960s
Authors: MENNILL SALLY
Published: December 2016

This paper explores how the ideal birth was constructed after World War Two, noting in particular the abstract enthusiasm on the part of physicians and government advocates for technological innovation accompanied by simultaneous silence regarding the specificities of labour and delivery in advice literature. The relationship of prescriptive mothering to the nascent medical ideology of prevention-oriented surveillance had a direct impact on the disembodying of women in the birthing process. Both vaginal and surgical childbirth were kept firmly within the realm of medical expertise, painting parturition as something that happened to women, rather than something they did themselves.
Portrait d’une institution oubliée : l’hôpital privé à but lucratif, 1900–1960
Authors: Charles Aline , Guérard François
Published: December 2016

Apparu durant le XIXe siècle au Canada, l’hôpital à but lucratif se développe jusqu’à la décennie 1970. Son histoire méconnue importe particulièrement aujourd’hui puisqu’après une éclipse d’une quarantaine d’années, il a ressurgi. Cet article retrace les phases de son implantation au Québec en faisant ressortir une remarquable diversité de créneaux et de clientèles comme de propriétaires ou de gestionnaires. Multiforme, agissant en concurrence ou en complémentarité avec les établissements sans but lucratif, prompt à exploiter des marchés négligés par ces derniers et cherchant à s’en démarquer, terrain d’élection d’entrepreneures féminines, l’hôpital à but lucratif livre une histoire qui surprend.
L’infirmière du Québec : Un discours d’élites professionnelles, 1993–2003
Authors: Nazon Évy
Published: December 2016

En s’appuyant sur la revue professionnelle L’infirmière du Québec, publiée par l’Ordre des Infirmières et Infirmiers du Québec de 1993 à 2003, cet article scrute la relation entre élites et infirmières de chevet et plus particulièrement les rapports les opposant autour des conditions de travail. Il permet de dégager de quelles manières les infirmières de chevet et leurs conditions de travail ont été occultées dans les colonnes de cette revue. Il montre également que tout en propageant une vision scientifique des soins infirmiers répondant aux critères de modernité, la revue favorise une approche élitiste de la profession basée sur l’excellence et l’innovation.
“Tobacco Truths”: Health Magazine, Clinical Epidemiology, and the Cigarette Connection
Authors: Wilmshurst Sara
Published: December 2016

In the 1950s, Health, a magazine published by the Health League of Canada, was nonchalant about the risks of smoking and largely ignored early epidemiological studies of lung cancer. In the 1960s the magazine stopped accepting cigarette advertising and began to oppose smoking. Health’s writers adjusted to new knowledge; the magazine gradually accepted clinical epidemiology as a source of medical knowledge and recognized smoking as a public health risk. As Canada’s only devoted health publication for a lay audience at the time, Health provides a unique window into ways that smoking and health were portrayed to its readers.
Equine Surgery at the Ontario Veterinary College in the Early 20th Century
Authors: Woodger Kevin , Stone Elizabeth A
Published: December 2016

This article seeks to examine the history of equine surgery at the Ontario Veterinary College (OVC) in the context of the changing horse economy during the first half of the 20th century. We argue that despite the transition to livestock medicine, public health and small animal practice, the horse, especially as a surgical topic, retained a (diminished) place at OVC due to the lucrative new recreational equine market, the deep links between horses and veterinary medicine, and the equine focus for nearly half a century of Dr. W.J.R. Fowler, the College’s primary surgical instructor.
« Sans honte et sans regret » : Les chemins de traverse entre le pénal et le psychiatrique dans les cas d’aliénation criminelle à Montréal, 1920–1950
Authors: Perreault Isabelle
Published: December 2016

C’est le Dr Daniel Plouffe, psychiatre responsable des cas de transferts de femmes de la Prison des femmes Fullum à l’Hôpital Saint-Jean-de-Dieu et du traitement des hommes internés à l’Hôpital pour aliénés criminels de la Prison de Bordeaux, qui est en charge de l’évaluation des aliénés criminels entre 1920 et 1950. À l’aide des dossiers de patients internés à l’Hôpital Saint-Jean-de-Dieu, cet article propose une analyse des comportements criminels et, surtout, des indices permettant aux nouveaux experts de statuer sur l’état mental de la personne lors du crime. Assauts, vagabondage, prostitution, pyromanie, violence, et vols sont quelques-uns des comportements inscrits au dossier qui ont déclenché le processus judiciaire de mise à l’écart et, par la suite, de psychiatrisation. Ces dossiers serviront à illustrer les lentes mais fructueuses tentatives des médecins légistes et psychiatres qui ont exercé des pressions pour la reconnaissance de ce champ d’expertise où on entend traiter plutôt que punir les criminels mentalement dérangés.
Heredity As Ideology: Ideas of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union of The United States and Ontario on Heredity and Social Reform, 1880–1910
Authors: Bedford Riiko
Published: December 2016

The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) of the United States and Ontario created in the 1880s departments of work dedicated to the study and care of heredity. This article examines the history of these departments and explores how the two organizations made differing use of the concept of heredity to support their particular agendas and methods for social reform. By exploring how heredity functioned as a malleable resource for the WCTU, this comparative case study also serves as an example of the cultural lives of scientific concepts.
La réputation du médecin : corps médical et subdélégués dans la France prérévolutionnaire
Authors: Goubert Jean-Pierre
Published: December 2016

Les chirurgiens, on le sait, avaient alors mauvaise réputation, surtout lorsqu'elle s'exprimait par la plume des médecins. Figure obligée du discours « éclairé», elle était fort exagérée, comme l'ont marqué certains historiens. D'autant qu'il existait, derrière le vocable de chirurgien, une notable confusion sur la nature des études et la pratique qu'avaient pensé rompre l'édit de Marly (1707) et la promotion de la chirurgie au rang d'art libéral (1741).
Juan Luis Vives: A Humanistic Medical Educator
Authors: Travill A.A
Published: December 2016

One of the most emotive pieces of medicine's historical apocrypha places Dr. Thomas Linacre during the summer of 1499 on top of Little St. Bernard Pass. He is on his way home to England, but while looking wistfully back towards Italy he reverently builds a votive altar to his academic Sancta Mater. On turning his steps north he passes into history as England's premier physician and “restorer of learning,” a reputation which he was about to earn and which is still maintained almost five centuries later.
L'enseignement clinique au XVIIIe siècle : l'exemple de Tissot
Authors: Emch-Dériaz Antoinette
Published: December 2016

Pourquoi vouloir encore se pencher sur le problème de l'enseignement clinique au XVIIIe siècle, alors qu'il semble que l'unanimité des historiens de la médecine en donne les commencements à Leyde au tournant du XVIIIe siècle et l'épanouissement à Paris près de cent ans plus tard? Mon propos, aujourd'hui, est de dépasser un cadre strictement médical et de replacer, dans le courant général du tournant des mentalités de la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle, l'étude de l'évolution de l'enseignement clinique au cours du siècle des Lumières et de cerner dans cette évolution le problème de continuité — ou de rupture — des buts et moyens de l'enseignement pratique de la médecine.
Gender and Insanity as Characteristics of the Insane: A Nineteenth-Century Case
Authors: Mitchinson Wendy
Published: December 2016

Since the mid-1960s, social control has been a major explanatory model in accounting for the emergence and development of insane asylums. Of specific concern was the introduction in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century of “moral treatment.” Historians have debated the reasons for its introduction and its value endlessly, and while the debate has added greatly to our understanding of asylum reformers and bureaucracies, it has not contributed equally to our understanding of who the insane were. Recent studies have begun to do this.
The Economic Status of the Practice of Dr. Harmaunus Smith in Wentworth County, Ontario, 1826-67
Authors: Roland Charles G , Rubashewsky Bohodar
Published: December 2016

Dr. Harmaunus Smith lived and practiced in the area of Hamilton, Ontario, from 1818 until 1872. His account books are extant from 1826 through 1867; these books give considerable data on the fiscal aspects of Smith’s practice but little information on its clinical details. Analyzing these data, and including further information on heads of households obtained from census and assessment reports, reveals that Smith earned only a very modest income from his practice, being paid only a fraction of what he charged. His fees remained the same or fell over the duration of his practice. His well-to-do patients seem neither to have used his services more, nor to have been any more likely to pay their bills, than those less well off.
Moral Treatment to Monolith: The Institutional Treatment of the Insane in Manitoba, 1871-1919
Authors: Edginton Barry
Published: December 2016

This paper describes the development of asylums from the era of moral treatment, in the early nineteenth century, to the large, overcrowded asylums of the early twentieth century. By using the asylums of Manitoba as an example of this change, the discussion illustrates the increased reliance on the asylum to act as a mode of treatment. Asylum design, as a therapeutic tool, reflected the particular views of treating insanity as well as the social conditions surrounding the construction of the asylum. The design of the asylum incorporated organization, classification, and discipline along with security in an attempt to calm and cure insanity. The "well ordered asylum" was the best means of treating insanity in an age when medical knowledge could do little for those incarcerated in asylums. Unfortunately, and counter to the best interests of architects and medical superintendents, asylum design exacerbated the poor conditions of care caused by overcrowding and lack of personal care.