McGill-Queen's/Associated Medical Services Studies in the History of Medicine, Health, and Society

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Latest release: February 15, 2023
Series
71
Books
Home Medicine: The Newfoundland Experience
Book 1·Sep 1994
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Based on material from the Folklore Archives at Memorial University as well as other sources, Crellin's catalogue includes such topics as abortion, baldness and hair preparations, blood-letting, cancer, drunkenness, female complaints, Gin Pills, herbs, midwifery and childbirth, Newfoundland stomach, poultices, prepared cures, rheumatism and arthritis, and tonics. Looking at the interplay between mainstream physicians and alternative treatments, and the effect of folk beliefs on today's self-care practices, Crellin examines how the advent of modern medicine has affected self-treatment. His extensive use of oral and written commentary gives the book a personal dimension that adds to its charm. Home Medicine will appeal to those interested in alternative medicine, folklore, and Atlantic Canada, and to medical and social historians.
Long Way from Home: The Tuberculosis Epidemic among the Inuit
Book 2·Oct 1994
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Based on recollections of patients, interviews with participants in the government programs, available literature and statistics, and records of the Northern Affairs Program, Grygier examines the programs for the Inuit in all parts of Canada. She also explores the history of tuberculosis in Canada, conditions of life in the North for both Inuit and non-Natives, and the development and modification of government administration of the North. This important study will be of interest to those in Native and northern studies, Canadian social and political history, and the history of medicine in Canada.
Labrador Odyssey: The Journal and Photographs of Eliot Curwen on the Second Voyage of Wilfred Grenfell, 1893
Book 3·Jan 1996
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A religious, well-educated Victorian, Curwen takes us into the heart of the colonial society he encountered. He reveals the pervasive sectarianism, the tawdry political world of St John's, the rudimentary conditions aboard the fishing schooners, and the poverty of the Labrador "livyers," the permanent white settlers who had intermarried with the Inuit. He provides fresh details of the lives of the Moravian Brethren, the first missionaries to the Native population, and comments on the wildlife, the natural environment, and the general disposition of the countryside. Curwen's candid remarks about Grenfell reveal facets of the young missionary and social reformer not found elsewhere. The introduction and annotations by Ronald Rompkey, Grenfell's biographer, establish the historical, political, and social contexts of the journal. Rompkey has supplemented Curwen's private account with official letters and reports from Grenfell and other members of the expedition as well as numerous photographs taken by both Curwen and Grenfell to publicize their work.
Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1870-1900
Book 4·Apr 1996
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Adams argues that the many significant changes seen in this period were due not to architects' efforts but to the work of feminists and health reformers. Contrary to the widely held belief that the home symbolized a refuge and safe haven to Victorians, Adams reveals that middle-class houses were actually considered poisonous and dangerous and explores the involvement of physicians in exposing "unhealthy" architecture and designing improved domestic environments. She examines the contradictory roles of middle-class women as both regulators of healthy houses and sources of disease and danger within their own homes, particularly during childbirth. Architecture in the Family Way sheds light on an ambiguous period in the histories of architecture, medicine, and women, revealing it to be a time of turmoil, not of progress and reform as is often assumed.
Local Hospitals in Ancien Régime France: Rationalization, Resistance, Renewal, 1530-1789
Book 5·Feb 1997
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During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the French Crown closed down thousands of local hospices, maladreries, and small hospitals that had been refuges for the sick and poor, supposedly acting in the name of efficiency, better management, and elimination of duplicate services. Its true motive, however, was to expropriate their revenues and holdings. Hickey shows how, in spite of government efforts, a countermovement emerged that to some degree foiled the Crown's attempts to suppress local hospitals. Charitable institutions, churchmen inspired by the new message of the Catholic Reformation, women's religious congregations, and community elites defied intervention measures, resisted proposed changes, and revitalized the very type of institution the Crown was trying to shut down. Hickey's conclusions are supported by a study of eight local hospitals, which allows him to measure the impact of Crown decisions on the day-to-day functioning of these local institutions. Challenging the interpretations of Michel Foucault and other historians, Hickey throws new light on an important area of early modern French history.
Foisted upon the Government?: State Responsibilities, Family Obligations, & Care of the Dependent Aged in Late 19th-Century Ont.
Book 6·Jul 1997
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While government officials in the 1890s claimed that forcing families to take responsibility for caring for the aged was in the interest of the elderly, Edgar-André Montigny reveals that government policy had more to with saving money than a desire to serve the aged. He provides a harsh critique of Ontario government policies toward the elderly and their families at the end of the nineteenth century and highlights similarities between what happened in the 1890s and current policy reforms in the area of long-term care. Montigny argues that government played a central role in determining how society viewed the elderly and family obligations to them. Using census data, municipal records, and institutional case files, he demonstrates that the government created and promoted an image of the aged population that bore little resemblance to reality and manipulated the concept of family obligations to justify policies to reduce social welfare costs. The effect of these policies, passed in the name of helping the elderly and their families, was almost universally negative. By dispelling the myths that continue to influence public policy concerning the aged, Montigny provides a useful warning of the negative consequences of policies that are enacted to cut costs rather than to serve the population they are supposed to help.
Young Man's Benefit: The Independent Order of Odd Fellows and Sickness Insurance in the United States and Canada, 1860-1929
Book 7·Mar 1999
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Using cliometric methods and records from six grand-lodge archives, A Young Man's Benefit rejects the conventional wisdom about friendly societies and sickness insurance, arguing that IOOF lodges were financially sound institutions, were more efficient than commercial insurers, and met a market demand headed by young men who lacked alternatives to market insurance, not older men who had an above-average risk of sickness disability. Emery and Emery show that many young men joined the Odd Fellows for sickness insurance and quit the society once self-insurance - savings - or family insurance - secondary incomes from older children - made it feasible for them. The older men, who valued the social benefits of membership and did not need the sick benefit, gradually became a majority and dismantled the IOOF's insurance provisions.
Weariness, the Fever, and the Fret: The Campaign against Tuberculosis in Canada, 1900-1950
Book 8·Sep 1999
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In The Weariness, the Fever, and the Fret Katherine McCuaig takes an in-depth look at the campaign against TB, from its beginnings as part of the turn-of-the-century urban social reform movement to the 1950s and the discovery of antibiotics that could cure it. Although the bacillus that causes it had been discovered in 1882, at the turn of the century TB was, as Osler observed, "a social disease with a medical aspect." With "fresh air, good food, good houses, and hope" as the only available treatment, fighting the disease meant not only eliminating the germ but attacking the underlying social problems that predisposed an individual to disease - alcoholism and poor living and working conditions. By the end of World War I the bacteriological approach had become dominant, with federally expanded sanatoria, increasing provincial involvement and responsibility, and more sophisticated technology to diagnose and treat the disease. The campaign against TB not only influenced the way in which health services were established and the division of responsibility among various levels of government and volunteers but profoundly affected attitudes toward the political and economic development of Canadian health care and the ultimate demand for medicare. Drawing on sources ranging from government reports and archival material to more general North American social and political historical research, McCuaig demonstrates how TB was viewed and how it was controlled, which owed as much to changing attitudes in society as to bacteriological discoveries.
War Diary of Clare Gass
Book 9·Oct 2000
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During the First World War Clare Gass spent four years as a lieutenant and nursing sister in the medical corps of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. The War Diary of Clare Gass documents her daily experiences, from the beginning of her military training in 1915 to her return from Europe in 1918. Gass records the sights and sounds and smells of war as well as quoting the then-unknown "In Flanders' Fields," written by her colleague Dr John McCrae. Well aware that her work was an exceptional experience for a woman, she made the most of her time, whether nursing, exploring the countryside around the hospital, or taking photographs. Her lively personality and passion for her work shine through the diary and offer a unique perspective on the Canadian contribution to the war effort. The diary reveals a woman who took it for granted that she should do everything possible to aid the war effort and details her care of the sick and wounded at No. 3 Canadian General Hospital (McGill), forty miles behind the trenches, as well as at No. 2 Canadian Casualty Clearing Station, where she was within range of the shells. Combined with Susan Mann's sensitive and thoughtful introduction, the Gass diary provides a fresh look at Canadian participation in the First World War. It will appeal to a wide range of readers with an interest in military history, women's history, medical history, gender and war, diaries, and the history of nursing.
Committed to the State Asylum: Insanity and Society in Nineteenth-Century Quebec and Ontario
Book 10·Jan 2001
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Unlike other studies, Committed to the State Asylum shows the important role that the community played in shaping the asylum and tackles the thorny issue of state development, explaining how state asylums developed differently in each province. He considers Canada?s pioneering institutional efforts at dealing with the criminally insane and why those efforts lasted only a short time, shedding new light on the debate about the nature and extent of state involvement in nineteenth-century Canadian society. Committed to the State Asylum offers new insights into the ways in which both ordinary families and the state understood and responded to those they thought had crossed the boundaries of sane behaviour.
Jessie Luther at the Grenfell Mission
Book 11·Apr 2001
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While her journal concentrates on her efforts to teach weaving, carving, metal work, pottery, carpentry, basket weaving, and her best known accomplishment, the hooked mats that have become famous for their strong designs and meticulous craftsmanship, she also describes the local people and customs of St Anthony and life in the household of the Grenfell workers. After she left Newfoundland, Luther became one of the pioneers of occupational therapy in the United States, spending the rest of her professional life as director of occupational therapy at the Butler Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island. Edited by Ronald Rompkey, author of the most authoritative biography of Grenfell, Luther's journal provides an unusually intimate account of Wilfred Grenfell during these four years B his idiosyncracies, his attempts to meet the needs of the community, his rescue from a floating ice pan, his marriage B and brings to life the Newfoundlanders with whom she worked.
Negotiating Disease: Power and Cancer Care, 1900-1950
Book 12·Sep 2001
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Her detailed analysis of popular beliefs and behaviours reveals the compelling logic of personal decisions about health and healing. Experience and expectation, not fear and ignorance, shaped the health care choices of both cancer sufferers and the "healthy" public. A close examination of three unconventional practitioners in Ontario demonstrates the importance and vitality of alternative medicine. By presenting treatment options that were congenial and plausible to cancer sufferers, these healers contested the authority of conventional medicine. An investigation of government cancer care policy, particularly the activities of Ontario's Commission for the Investigation of Cancer Remedies, exposes the difficulties of defining legitimate health care and the limits of state support for the medical profession. This is, ultimately, a book about who held power in medical encounters in the past. With masterful assurance and a highly readable style, Clow portrays the disputes between sufferers and healers, practitioners and politicians, and legislators and laity that coloured perceptions of medical authority and constrained the power of the profession.
For Patients of Moderate Means: A Social History of the Voluntary Public General Hospital in Canada, 1890-1950
Book 13·Nov 2002
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The Great Depression, however, finally exhausted the average patient's ability to pay and engendered a national health-care crisis. A public hospital insurance scheme was first achieved in Saskatchewan in 1947 and nationally in 1957. Universal accessibility without fear of the financial consequences of hospitalization reflected concern for both the medical health of Canadians unable to pay for hospital care, and the economic health of the paying 'patient of moderate means' threatened with medical pauperization. It also provided the resources necessary to address the modern epidemic of lifestyle diseases and to accommodate the demands of the post-war therapeutic revolution. Employing the historical records of selected individual hospitals, reports and data from all levels of government, a wide range of professional medical, nursing, hospital, and public health journals, and the international historiography of hospital history, David and Rosemary Gagan describe and account for the invention, rise, decline, and rebirth of the modern Canadian hospital between 1890 and 1950. They pay particular attention to the evolving interdependence of doctors and hospitals in the struggle to legitimate the social and cultural authority of scientific medicine, the evolution of hospital-based nursing, and the experiences of patients.
Into the House of Old: A History of Residential Care in British Columbia
Book 14·May 2003
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Davies' study of institutional life is multi-textured, informed by social and architectural theory while telling us much about daily life in these facilities. We learn about angry rebellion and harsh discipline, fun and festivals, death and compassion. And we see how the twentieth century witnessed the gradual withdrawal of these institutions from the life of the community, further enhancing the marginal place of the old age home in our society. Chronicling the evolution of professional ideas about residential care facilities and an innovative program to move elderly patients out of acute care hospital beds, "Into the House of Old" provides a context for understanding this problematic institution as both an offspring of the poor law and a product of the post-Second World War expansion of state medical services.
St Mary's: The History of a London Teaching Hospital
Book 15·May 2003
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Focusing on St. Mary's hospital, London's great teaching hospital and traditionally the pre-eminent site for medical education in England, E.A. Heaman traces the emergence of the modern scientific teaching hospital and the intellectual, social, and political forces shaping it. Examining the social problems connected with health and the political debates around these problems at both the local parish level and on the national stage, Heaman explains how and why hospitals like St Mary's - originally charitable institutions for the poor - began to admit middle-class patients and eventually came under a national health insurance scheme.
Women, Health, and Nation: Canada and the United States since 1945
Book 16·Apr 2003
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Authors provide a much-needed analysis of the dynamic decades after 1945, when both Canada and the United States began using federal funds to expand health-care access, and biomedical research and authority reached new heights. Focusing on a wide range of issues - including childbirth, abortion and sterilization, palliative care, pharmaceutical regulation, immigration, and Native health care - these essays illuminate the ironic promise of biomedicine, postwar transformations in reproduction, the varied work and belief-systems of female health-care providers, and national differences in women's health activism. Contributors include Aline Charles (Laval University), Barbara Clow (independent scholar), Laura E. Ettinger (Clarkson University), Georgina Feldberg (York University), Karen Flynn (York University), Vanessa Northington Gamble (Association of American Medical Colleges), Elena R. Gutiérrez (University of Illinois, Chicago), Molly Ladd-Taylor (York University), Alison Li (independent scholar), Maureen McCall (physician, Nepal), Michelle L. McClellan (University of Georgia), Kathryn McPherson (York University), Dawn Dorothy Nickel (University of Alberta), Heather Munro Prescott (Central Connecticut State University), Leslie J. Reagan (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), Susan M. Reverby (Wellesley College), Susan L. Smith (University of Alberta), Ann Starr (visual artist and writer), and Judith Bender Zelmanovits (York University).
Labrador Memoir of Dr Harry Paddon, 1912-1938
Book 17·Jul 2003
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Paddon's memoir gives the reader a sense of the resident Innu, Inuit, and settler communities, as well as the prevailing institutions of non-governmental authority: the Hudson's Bay Company, the Moravian Mission, and the International Grenfell Association. At a time when Labrador is undergoing further industrial development and social change, his writings, carefully edited and annotated by Ronald Rompkey, the biographer of Sir Wilfred Grenfell, capture the heart of the region and its people.
J.B. Collip and the Development of Medical Research in Canada: Extracts and Enterprise
Book 18·Oct 2003
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In the early years of the twentieth century medical research in Canada was the job of a select few. By mid-century it had grown into a systematic, large-scale venture that involved teams of professional scientists and dozens of laboratories in universities, government, and industry. J.B. Collip - skilled both as a bench scientist and an entrepreneur - played a leading role in this transformation. In J.B. Collip and the Development of Medical Research in Canada Alison Li details how Collip leapt into prominence in 1921-22 as part of the team at the University of Toronto that isolated insulin. When the Nobel Prize was awarded to Frederick Banting and J.J.R. Macleod in 1923, Banting announced he was sharing his award with Charles Best; Macleod in turn announced he was sharing his award with Collip. Collip was known for his remarkable skills in making hormone extracts, many of which proved to have therapeutic, and therefore commercial, value. At McGill University in the 1930s he headed a thriving research group that carried out investigations of the pituitary and sex hormones, including development of one of the first orally active estrogen products. Collip's story sheds light on early negotiations between academic science and the pharmaceutical industry and on the complexities of sustaining a research laboratory before the rise of government funding. As the head of the National Research Council's medical research division during its formative years, Collip helped shape the foundations of organized support for medical research in Canada.
Ontario Cancer Institute: Successes and Reverses at Sherbourne Street
Book 19·Aug 2003
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To achieve this goal the institute divided its operation into four strands: two of the strands were the research areas - the study of advanced radiation therapy and biology, which worked separatively but cooperatively; a third was patient care; and the fourth element was leadership, provided by the clinical chiefs, the heads of the research divisions, and the administration, in particular the institute's first administrator, John Law. Together these strands helped create a philosophy that made the Ontario Cancer Institute unique and provided the basis for its national and international success. Essential to these successes was a new graduate department, Medical Biophysics, based in the University of Toronto School of Graduate Studies. This department, which provided an innovative, research-based doctoral and masters program, meant that the OCI could accurately be described as a centre for cancer treatment, research, and education. McCulloch describes how the first quantitative assay for stem cells played a major role in bringing OCI research to the international stage as well as influencing other science and much of the clinical thinking in the Institute. Other major advances that brought international recognition have been the identification of the mechanisms that allow cancer cells to resist death from the effects of a variety of different tumours and the isolation of the gene that encodes the T cell receptor, a critical part of the immune apparatus for dealing with foreign cells and viruses. McCulloch also details how lack of space to meet growing demands was a continuing source of frustration and disagreement, and how sometimes serious interpersonal problems hindered the forward thrust of development. Describing these events as well as institute's successes, he provides an insight into the history of Canada's premier cancer research centre.
Island Doctor: John Mackieson and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Prince Edward Island
Book 20·Sep 2003
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Based on a study of two casebooks, which include Dr Mackieson records for 257 patients with a variety of illnesses seen from 1826 to 1858 and 115 patients with mental illness seen from 1868 to 1874, two manuscripts, and a diary, David Shephard illustrates the wide variety of representative cases in Dr Mackieson's career and situates his work in the context of medical practice at the time. The book will interest a variety of readers, including general historians, medical historians, social historians, historians with an interest in the Atlantic provinces, physicians, and academic libraries.