"LET NOT THE PEOPLE PERISH FOR LACK OF KNOWLEDGE": PUBLIC HEALTH NURSING AND THE ONTARIO RURAL CHILD WELFARE PROJECT, 1916-1930 (CANADA).
Contributors: University of Pennsylvania.
Published: 1987
Number of pages: 230
Subjects: Health Sciences, Nursing.; Health Sciences, Public Health.
Description: In October 1920, the Provincial Board of Health of Ontario sent sixteen public health nurses to the northern and rural parts of the province to 'educate' mothers in an attempt to lower the unacceptably high infant mortality rate. This study examines the relationship between the official perceptions and actions of the Board in relation to the child welfare project and the actual experiences of the nurses in the small communities they visited. Its purpose is to explore the evolving social context, as well as the economic and political forces, which shaped the delivery of public health programs and the profession of public health nursing in the first three decades of the twentieth century.

Analysis of the nurses' relationships with male politicians and physicians, as well as the women who were their patients and allies in local women's organizations, led to four main conclusions. First, the Board was largely unsuccessful in convincing local communities to hire their own nurses because of unclear goals and invalid assumptions about the rural and northern populations' ready acceptance of the urban, central Board's programs. Second, the lack of material and human resources in many isolated, rural areas mitigated against the nurses' ability to teach prevention, and meant that nurses often substituted for physicians in treating illness and ensuring the populations' very survival. Third, the nurses experienced the narrow limits of unequal power relationships with male physicians and politicians, preventing them from publicly speaking out about conflict and contradictions in their work. Finally, through their alliance with middle-class women in reform organizations, they were able to adopt maternal/domestic solutions to the problems they encountered and actively transform some of the external constraints on their work with mothers and children.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 49-02, Section: B, page: 0364.

Thesis (PH.D.)--UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, 1987.

School code: 0175.