Thine Own Keeper: Life at the Nova Scotia Sanatorium, 1904-1977

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

The Nova Scotia Sanatorium, established in Kentville in 1904, was the
first provincially sponsored tuberculosis treatment centre in Canada.
Ripley’s purpose is to tell the story of what would become a
world-class institution largely by recounting the personal memories of
“San” patients, notably their responses to their affliction, to
their treatment within its walls, and to the doctors, nurses, and other
patients who constituted their lives as they underwent “The Cure.”
The sanatorium’s first superintendent, appointed in 1910, was Dr.
Arthur Frederick Miller, a patient and then colleague of the American
physician Dr. Edwart Trudeau. Trudeau is considered the North American
pioneer of modern tuberculosis treatment. As Ripley points out, one of
the most significant contributions to the field attributed to Trudeau,
himself a TB sufferer, was a new medical consideration given to the
psychological factors involved in disease and its treatment. Dr. Trudeau
was committed to the value of “victories of the spirit” in the
successful treatment of organic ailments such as tuberculosis.

Trudeau’s theories were to be the foundation of the Kentville
sanatorium, effected and carried out through the diligence and
aggressive administration of Miller and his successors, until its
closing in 1977. Ripley’s approach to the sanatorium’s history is
neither the typically “medical,” which catalogues administration,
treatment, and day-to-day functioning, nor the typically celebratory,
which aims to tell a tale of on-going progress and success. Rather, his
purpose is to relate “the true life stories” of people afflicted
with a deadly contagious disease that killed more Canadians between the
ages of 15 and 50 than any other in the entire first half of this
century. The author makes the poignant observation that TB sufferers
were once ostracized as cruelly as are today’s AIDS patients.

This book makes an interesting and informative contribution to the
history of Canadian medicine, particularly by bringing to light the
patients’ point of view, so often ignored or overlooked in academic
histories. It is at times terrifying, at times inspiring, and always
moving in its recounting of life as an “incurable” in a time when
medical science could do little more for TB patients than keep them
isolated from society. it is a pity that the author does not cite his
sources or describe his method, so that students of medical history
could continue and build on this research.