This article puts into conversation Wilder Penfield's correspondence with his mother, a novel about Hippocrates he published in 1960, and his work for the Vanier Institute of the Family. I argue that Penfield drew on an epistemology of personal experience in both medicine and family life to influence the conversation about social values and national and professional identity. Specifically, in threading connections between the medical family and the conventional family, he cast the mother/wife as a critically important figure who could help the doctor mediate between his professional and domestic worlds, while not herself being a protagonist in professional spaces. This article thus bridges the conceptual realms of the domestic and professional spheres, illuminating ideas and narratives of identity that were available to doctors and to Canadians and that shaped the cultural and professional landscapes of the twentieth century.
This paper presents a significant case study in the history of care architecture. It illustrates how the work of care, mothering, and architectural production can be inextricably linked - albeit often invisibly. It builds on the scholarship of Annmarie Adams and Cynthia Hammond, who have each argued that certain groups of women, historically credited only with domestic, medical, or caring skills, also had significant spatial knowledge and influence. Helen House (Oxford, UK, 1982) was the first paediatric hospice in the world. Designed by architect John Bicknell of Bicknell and Hamilton (London, UK) and accommodating eight children at a time, the house was named for Helen Worswick, a child who, at two years old, was found to have a brain tumour. In this paper, I tell the story of Helen House from the perspective of its architecture, specifically tracing the contributions of Helen's mother Jacqueline, Helen House founder Sister Frances Dominica Ritchie, and Helen herself. First, like Adams and Hammond before me, I demonstrate that the story of Helen House and paediatric hospice care is yet another where non-architect women carers were deeply involved in creating architecture. Second, I suggest that even down to the name, Helen House leveraged domesticity and mothers' expertise to create a more palliative architecture for children with life-limiting illness - reinforcing the long-running image of the domestic sphere as a woman's, more specifically a mother's, domain. Finally, I argue that the creation, design, and building of Helen House served as a testing ground for the new care philosophy, allowing it to grow and come into its own spatially, functionally, and theoretically.
This essay explores letters between the neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield and his mother, Jean Jefferson Penfield, from his childhood to her death in 1935. I probe the role of the maternal bond in the famous physician's life to theorize this highly distinctive and understudied genre: mother-son correspondence. My focus is on references to place and space, a deep interest that the duo shared. Sharp architectural descriptions, including colours, decoration, furniture, and the condition of building materials, I argue, were ways the mother and son placed each other, while thousands of miles apart, akin to the way we might take selfies today, capturing a meaningful setting.
This study examines "scientific" mothercraft child healthcare advice from public health exhibitions (child welfare, baby week, and health week) in colonial India, with a particular focus on Bengal, mainly Calcutta. I analyze "expert" advice about mothering and midwifery given by famous figures such as the Bengali nationalist daktar Sundari Mohan Das at the Health and Child Welfare exhibition in colonial Calcutta in 1920, as well reports from public health exhibits in the region. The first section of this paper shows how baby and health week exhibitions directed public health education particularly to mothers and upheld the middle-class values on which both mothercraft and nationalism were predicated. The following two sections examine child feeding, hygiene, and midwifery. I argue that in colonial India engagement with Western medicine did not solely objectify the colonized but also allowed their agency and identity formation. These public health exhibitions can offer historians a significant entry point into transnational child health histories, illustrating how ideas and practices circulated widely in the early twentieth century and were taken up locally in specific ways.
By examining the path taken by the graduates of the Hackett Medical College for Women in Guangzhou, this article reveals that the experience of Chinese women doctors in the early twentieth century goes beyond the model of social motherhood. Although their professional career was framed by gendered norms, which oriented their medical practice towards the field of maternal and child health, as well as towards the private sector, they did not necessarily turn their back on marriage and family to devote themselves to the care of others. Rather, they approached medicine in a way that reconciled their professional and personal aspirations, perhaps even capitalizing on their status as wives and mothers to establish their authority and develop their practice. They have thus reshaped the female professional model supposed to define and justify their presence in the public space and within the medical profession.
Many global health experts, then and now, would agree with Colin McCord's 1976 assessment that "the application of the rural health centre concept around the world has to be one of the most dismal records of failure in the history of medicine." This article focuses on two important exceptions, successful and enduring rural health care projects begun in India and Bangladesh in the early 1970s. It draws on newly available archival sources to show how local physicians built comprehensive rural health care projects from the bottom up, funded by international NGOs but administratively independent of them. Where previous studies primarily explore rural health care for mothers and children, this one looks at village mothers as health care providers, trained to care for their own communities.
In nineteenth-century British India, the Anglo-Indian mother and the female Indian servants hired to help her with nursing and childcare were seen as potential rivals in the nursery. In the late nineteenth century, a divide in the discourse of nursing opened between, on one hand, medical handbooks and domestic guides preferring the Anglo-Indian mother, if healthy, to the dhai (Indian wet nurse) or ayah (Indian nursemaid) as a provider of milk to her infants and, on the other, Anglo-Indian fictional works by Rudyard Kipling and Sara Jeannette Duncan elevating the dhai or ayah above her British counterpart as a source of early maternal sustenance, particularly for sons. In these fictional narratives, the dhai or the bottle-feeding nursemaid is seen as a beneficial figure, whose milk (whether mammary or bottled) supplies to Anglo-Indian sons not only physical robustness but also an intuitive understanding of Indian cultures crucial to their efficacy as future imperial rulers. In these narratives, male Anglo-Indian infants, nourished by Indian milk and endowed by birth with British "blood," possess a quasi-biological hybridity that putatively ensures both an acculturation to native mores and an inborn loyalty to the British Raj that will allow them to serve, in adulthood, as model civil servants or army officers. These fictional works, moreover, reconceive the idea of motherhood: the eclipse of the Anglo-Indian mother, who is dead or simply ineffectual, and the temporary promotion of the dhai or ayah to maternal surrogate and facilitator of continued imperial dominance at a time of rising Indian nationalism.
Before incubators became a stable feature of hospital care for infants, North American audiences flocked to see tiny babies on display in incubator exhibits at fairs and carnivals. While the babies themselves were no doubt a draw, incubators also captured imaginations as symbols of scientific progress. Described as mechanical wombs, these medical machines were praised as substitute mothers, offering even better care to these babies than their own parents. Examining the popular media and medical discourse surrounding incubator shows, this paper explores the specific promise of the incubator as an artificial mother, asking why this technological replacement for mothers appeared so appealing to audiences in the first decade of the twentieth century. I argue that public health concerns about inexperienced mothers aligned with a medical construction of the uterus as delicate and faulty, motivating desires for a mechanical replacement for mothers' bodies and care. Biological mothers were replaced by a new technological system of incubators plus carefully supervised nursing, which together became a kind of artificial mother. This was a system deliberately modelled on chicken incubation, offering a eugenic promise of supervised human reproduction.
Scholarship on Black women in the Americas has articulated the historical importance of maternal newborn care and reproductive healthcare as crucial factors shaping the experiences of women and pubescent girls. As part of the "economics of slavery," Black women were forced into childbearing and were denied the opportunity to mother their children. Some enslaved women were forced to breastfeed the children of their enslavers, helping to raise them. Some mothers also witnessed their children being sold, tearing their families apart. Enslaved and free Black women on and off plantations acquired midwifery skills informally because their families were often denied access to medical care. Despite Black women's presence on traditional Indigenous territories for centuries in what became Canada, midwifery, maternal, and overall holistic care work performed by Black women is rarely documented. Indeed, when Black women's relationship with babies and children is discussed, it is often as domestic workers caring for middle-class white women's children during the beginning and the middle of the twentieth century. The central question guiding this article is this: Based on the paucity of sources, what do we know about Black women's maternal experiences and midwifery skill set in the Canadian context? Drawing on Black Canadian feminist theorizing and cultural theorist Saidiya Hartman's notion of "critical fabulation," this paper seeks to explore how maternal healthcare and midwifery skills served as sites of racially gendered oppression and simultaneously how Black women's healing and midwifery skills served as vital familial, community, and racialized resistance from the colonial period to the beginning of the twentieth century.
This article examines the contradictory linguistic posture adopted by the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Ottawa and the way in which Francophones and French language evolved there from 1945 to 1965. We suggest that the institution used English as a key to access government funding, allowing it to develop and, above all, to accredit its medical school. We also show that the standardization process in which the Faculty engaged opened the door even wider to the English language and to Anglo-American models of medical education. Even if French Canadians were able to create spaces for survival within the Faculty, the University negotiated their access to medical education at a high price. The result, we suggest, is that it continued to evolve in this unusual posture, convinced that it had to train doctors in English to serve French Canadians.
This article examines the history of discrimination against women, Jews, Blacks, and Asians at the University of Toronto dental school from 1921 to 2000. The University of Toronto was the largest dental school in Canada. Discrimination could take various forms - the most obvious was a quota. As this article will show, although it was not a quota per se, the University of Toronto dental school discriminated against Jewish students in the admissions process at least until 1954 and possibly thereafter. There appears to have been no discrimination against women in the admission process, although there is evidence of discrimination against Asian applicants. In addition to discrimination around admissions, students and professors also subjected Jewish, female, and other minority students to daily acts of hostility (sometimes guised in the form of teasing) that made the atmosphere less than welcoming.
This study investigates the evolution of hospital development in Saskatchewan during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Utilizing provincial health department reports, local newspapers, and Victorian Order of Nurses records, it highlights the shifting social and health priorities that solidified the dominance of municipal hospitals in the Canadian prairie. Charitable religious and women's organizations were significantly involved in the earliest hospital development. The Union Hospital Act of 1917 marked a significant shift, enabling municipalities to collaborate through taxation to fund small hospitals. Initially focused on infectious disease control for immigrant settlers, public health officials later championed small union hospitals to prevent maternal and infant deaths. The uneven success of early hospitals, shaped by diverse funding sources and regional disparities, challenges the notion of hospitals as preordained sites for Medicare, reflecting instead a shifting negotiation of priorities, resources, and public health goals related to Saskatchewan's health system history.
Tonsillectomy was one of the most common surgeries in Canada in the mid-twentieth century. Tonsils received blame for many health problems, and advocates of the tonsillectomy said it was an important form of preventative medicine. However, like all surgeries, the procedure came with dangers. Only a small percentage of patients - most of whom were children - suffered injuries or died, but the large number of tonsillectomies meant that a substantial number of people experienced adverse outcomes. Plaintiffs who sued for medical malpractice faced a tort law system that made it extremely difficult to secure compensation. So long as the procedure was carried out with an ordinary level of skill and care, no compensation was typically available. This paper shows how Canadian law facilitated the use of tonsillectomy, and, in doing so, highlights the need to consider the role of judge-made law in the history of medicine.
In 1987, the British Columbia Coalition of the Disabled launched the AIDS and Disability Action Project. This article studies phase one of the project, undertaken from 1987 through 1991, to trace how the Coalition educated the disability community about HIV/AIDS, advocated for HIV/AIDS to be recognized as a disability, and pushed for cooperation between the HIV/AIDS and disability movements. Accordingly, it analyzes the research reports, educational materials, and conference presentations produced by and for the Coalition during this time. A critical evaluation of these materials demonstrates how the gay rights and disability rights movements were repeatedly juxtaposed to uncover strategies that could benefit HIV/AIDS activism, which inadvertently overlooked barriers that prevented the communities from cooperating. By contextualizing the efforts of the Coalition, however, this article highlights how they identified and challenged barriers that inhibited members of both communities from accessing services and support systems needed to fully integrate and participate in society.
Résumé. À Vichy, la cure thermale s'est transformée à la fin du XIX e siècle avec l'avancée des sciences médicales. Le traitement par les eaux s'accompagne à présent de soins diversifiés. Le thermalisme se bat en effet pour conquérir une triple reconnaissance médicale, scientifique et technique. Cet article interroge précisément l'ensemble du processus qui amène à l'exploitation, au sein de l’Établissement thermal, d'un espace spécialisé dédié à une « nouvelle » thérapie : la mécanothérapie. « Médication par le mouvement », dosée et appareillée, cette pratique bouleverse les usages. L'utilisation curative de l'exercice physique rigoureusement administré rompt avec les idées admises en matière de soins. Son caractère novateur permet d'entrevoir des enjeux thérapeutiques mais également stratégiques pour la reconnaissance de la station, sa modernisation et sa fréquentation. L'implantation de la mécanothérapie est à replacer dans un processus concurrentiel entre les différentes stations thermales de la Belle Époque. Elle apporte diversification et renouvellement des soins et participe, dans une perspective à la fois commerciale et publicitaire, à l'excellence médicale et au déploiement de faste du Grand Établissement thermal de Vichy.
Since the mid-twentieth century, the shared goal of healthcare systems of Canada and the Netherlands has been to achieve broad healthcare access and coverage for citizens despite their health system differences. However, the rhetoric of “state” control in Canada and “market” control in the Netherlands belies very different realities in both countries. A longer historical perspective uncovers the discrepancies between the rhetoric and reality of solidarity that has emerged – and still exists – in both countries. In Canada, universal healthcare is historically seen as an important cultural cornerstone to be facilitated by the state as a public good in the context of institutional paralysis. In contrast, the Dutch system is historically predicated on an ideology of limited state control and healthcare provision by private parties. Yet the historical development of the system shows an ever-growing influence of the state in ensuring universal access to a continually broadening range of health services.
This article explores the early roots of physical therapy as a professional field of expertise in British Columbia during the first decades of the twentieth century. It points to the importance of Pehr Henrik Ling's earlier work at the Royal Central Institute of Gymnastics in Sweden and traces the movement of Ling trained female gymnasts and physiotherapists to Canada and their role in the development of rehabilitation services for wounded soldiers returning from WW1, first in Ontario and Quebec and later in British Columbia. We trace the efforts of a small group of female physiotherapists in British Columbia to engage with an emergent female-dominated profession of physiotherapy in Canada while aligning with and remaining firmly linked to the authority of the male dominated medical profession. In this sense, women were both winners and losers in their efforts to gain access to and control over early developments in Canadian physical therapy.
A blind spot in the history of the healthcare professions is the evolution of “technical” professions, particularly after 1970. However, these professions underwent major changes at the end of the 20th century. We propose two case studies, on Quebec's paramedics and respiratory therapists’ professional projects. The projects and strategies of the two groups, which had previously differed, tended to converge after 1995. From then, both groups minimize their relationship with machines and technology. Instead, they claim new tasks focused on clinical evaluation and first-line intervention. Public reforms appear to be shaping this evolution in the political strategies, professional projects and even clinical preferences, of these healthcare professions after 1995.
