Health, charity, and citizenship: Protestant hospitals in rural Saskatchewan, Canada 1906-1942

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this study, the authors explore the history of two rural Presbyterian mission hospitals in Saskatchewan, Canada, during the early twentieth century. At this time, medical missionaries were encouraged to offer hospital care to support the early homesteaders of the Canadian prairies, linked to the construction of the ‘frontier’ British-Anglo empire. Small religious hospitals were initially seen as fundamental to the expansion of the nation-state, but many faced closure or financial ruin during the economic bust of the 1930s. Utilizing hospital, missionary and church records, they analyse how missionaries provided hospital care to a diverse community of primarily Eastern European immigrants. They argue that the nature of this hospital work varied greatly depending on the local context and hospital type. They demonstrate that the benefits of modernity were unevenly distributed among hospitals during this time. Presbyterian mission hospitals were holistic religious, medical and social institutions. In addition to providing medical and nursing care, missionaries in Presbyterian hospitals offered various forms of charity work. They were as concerned with the soul as they were with the body and as interested in improving community mores as they were with healing individual sickness. The course of history followed by these hospitals supported the narrative expressed by leftist Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) premier Tommy Douglas that radical change was required to prevent the financial demise of Saskatchewan hospitals after the Great Depression. The proliferation of union and community hospitals also reduced the former significance of these early Presbyterian hospitals. The study of small rural missionary hospitals in Canada reveals that hospitals were far from uniform during the early twentieth century, and provides a useful comparison for other missionary hospitals in diverse colonial contexts, prior to the development of state hospital insurance.