Medicine in Canadian Society: Historical Perspectives

Cynthia R. Comacchio is an assistant professor of History at Wilfrid
Laurier University in Waterloo.

This collection of historical essays on Canadian medicine is itself
something of a historical text: originally released in 1981, it was the
first such publication of work in the (at the time) “new social
history of medicine” in Canada. Shortt provided both a careful
historiographical introduction, outlining the differences between
traditional and new approaches to medical history, and a wide-ranging
compilation of studies, many of them inaugural and some still
unsurpassed. Included were (and still are, in the unchanged second
edition) essays by Robert Fortuine on the health of Eskimos; Arthur Ray
on diseases in the Western interior; Barbara Tunis on medical licensing
in Lower Canada; Hilda Neatby on the medical profession in the Northwest
Territory; Margaret Andrews on medical attendance in Vancouver in the
early 20th century; Veronica Strong-Boag on women doctors; and Michael
Bliss’s oft-reproduced discussion of pre-Freudian sexual ideas. In
addition, there are excerpts from now-classic monographs by Angus
McLaren (birth control and abortion), Neil Sutherland (school children
and public health), Terry Copp (public health in Montreal), and Geoffrey
Bilson (cholera).

In reissuing this valuable collection, McGill-Queen’s makes
conveniently available a variety of seminal studies in the area. The
problem is that most of these studies were published in the 1960s and
1970s (with the exception of the 1938 study of poor relief and medicine
in 18th-century Nova Scotia). While this does not detract from their
usefulness, sociomedical historiography has certainly moved ahead at a
considerable pace since the first edition was produced. In particular,
issues such as gender, professionalization, class, and the relationship
between medicine and the state have since been, and continue to be,
addressed by historians and social scientists. As such, this second
edition would have been much more beneficial to students and researchers
had it been updated to include a few more-recent examples of the genre.