Manitoba Medicine: A Brief History

Cynthia R. Comacchio is an associate professor of history at Wilfrid
Laurier University and the author of Nations Are Built of Babies: Saving
Ontario’s Mothers and Children.

Manitoba Medicine is a rich and thoroughly researched chronicle of the
evolution of medicine in Manitoba as told by two of the province’s
medical professionals and University of Manitoba faculty members. The
book is based on local archival material, Manitoba medical journals, and
medical autobiographies/biographies, as well as a considerable number of
oral testimonies from medical practitioners regarding their own
experiences.

Although the book’s primary focus is Manitoba, the authors are adept
at providing the international context in terms of major developments in
medical science, and in tracing these developments through the
province’s own medical history. They begin with a brief sketch of
aboriginal medicine and health in precontact days (following through the
reign of the fur-trading companies to the first attempts at white
settlement in the early l9th century) and end in 1983, on the occasion
of the centenary celebrations of the University of Manitoba’s medical
faculty. The 19th-century material is necessarily sketchy due to the
paucity of sources, especially where Native health and health care are
concerned.

Much more abundant is the information available on the 20th century.
Here the authors are able to chart the increasing professionalization
and sophistication of medicine in reference to public-health advances,
maternal and infant welfare, and urban and rural practices. They follow
Manitoba doctors out of province to outline their efforts during the two
world wars. The post–World War II era highlights the “revolution in
medicine” inaugurated by antibiotics during the war, with subsequent
rapid progress in pharmacology, diagnostics, and treatment; the effects
of the Red River flood of 1950; the polio epidemic of the 1950s; and
what the authors call “ivory tower” medical research thereafter. The
book concludes with an epilogue in which Carr and Beamish outline their
own views about medical issues in the years from 1983 to the present.

Though their book covers a considerable span of medical history, the
authors are always careful to fill in the socioeconomic context of
provincial life, especially as this context affected the people’s
health. It’s a shame that the patients’ voices are nowhere heard,
but this history, through doctors’ memories and a wonderful selection
of photographs, does flesh out some of the clinical aspects of
medicine’s evolution in Manitoba.