The first chapters of the book carefully track the development of Canada’s socialized medical system as it manifests in the imaginations of the nation’s poets and authors who depict care. Reciprocal flows are investigated in which these poets and authors are quoted in policy documents. The archive-based methodology is sustained in subsequent chapters that rely upon a unique interdisciplinary mix of medical history, philosophy of medicine, medical policy, theory inherent to the field of Canadian literature (focusing in particular on the garrison mentality as a form of aesthetic protest and the feminist ethics of care), and Indigenous ways of knowing.
Shane Neilson is a Fellow of the Family Physicians of Canada and has been practising medicine since 2000. He is currently an assistant clinical professor and faculty member of the Waterloo Regional Campus of McMaster University. He earned his Ph.D. in English in 2019 from McMaster, where he was awarded the Governor-General’s Gold Medal for his dissertation work. Neilson also was awarded SSHRC’s “Talent” award given to a single Canadian Ph.D. student in the social sciences and humanities in 2018. The author of many trade books of poetry, nonfiction, and short fiction, Neilson lives with his family along the Grand River in Cambridge, Ontario.