Nations Are Built of Babies: Saving Ontario's Mothers and Children

Gerald J. Stortz is an assistant professor of history at St. Jerome’s
College, University of Waterloo.

This important and informative contribution to Canadian social history
relates how the level of medical care improved in the first half of the
20th century. The result was a dramatic decrease in the mortality rate.
Comacchio argues that altruism was not the motivating force behind the
improvements in health care for mothers and children. Rather, the
various attempts to educate mothers on health-care matters—attempts
that were sponsored by the government and administered through the
medical profession—were consciously designed to provide a working
class that was healthy in both body and mind. Despite the mass of
factual material, this is a fascinating story of government involvement
in people’s lives, internecine rivalries in the medical profession
(especially between doctors and nurses), and the prominent role played
in the ongoing debate by such prominent women as Helen MacMurchy and
Charlotte Whitton. Nations Are Built of Babies is a powerful reminder
that it was only a relatively short time ago that those without
financial resources were routinely denied medical care.