Reflections on “Region” in Recent Writings on the History of Health and Medicine in Canada

Abstract

Into the House of Old: A History of Residential Care in British Columbia. By Megan J. Davies. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003. 264 pp. $75.00 (cloth) ISBN 9780773525023. $29.95 (paper) ISBN 9780773526457. Rockefeller Foundation Funding and Medical Education in Toronto, Montreal, and Halifax. By Marianne P. Fedunkiw. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005. 240 pp. $75.00 (cloth) ISBN 9780773528970. Steps on the Road to Medicare: Why Saskatchewan Led the Way. By C. Stuart Houston. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002. 176 pp. $70.00 (cloth) ISBN 9780773523661. $22.95 (paper) ISBN 9780773525504. Labour in the Laboratory: Medical Laboratory Workers in the Maritimes, 1900-1950. By Peter L. Twohig. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005. 264 pp. $70.00 (cloth) ISBN 9780773528611. In an article published in 2000 in the Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, Megan Davies challenges Canadian historians of medicine to be more alert to the analytical possibilities of region. Too often, she writes, the particularities of place have been ignored or effaced within canon that has been more concerned with analyses of professional development, institutional growth, and scientific change. She argues that greater attention to the local might help health historians not only to highlight what is unique or exceptional about given space, but also to develop more nuanced account of the links between health, health care, and social formation. Moreover, she posits that regional lens might help historians to overcome some of the weaknesses of national treatments, which tend to overlook the degree to which practices in Canada were shaped by regimes of knowledge and interest that were transnational in scope, reinterpreted according to local conditions. Drawing on geographer Cole Harris's metaphor of Canada as archipelago, a string of islands tenuously united by sentiment, technology and the commonality of the urban experience, she urges medical historians to strive to write history that is at once attentive to what is unique about the place that they study and that tries to situate that place within more organic whole history of health and medicine in Canada (2000, 73). Davies's injunction to historians of medicine to be more attentive to region fits within wider movement in English-language historical writing on Canada, which is revisiting this once-prominent category.1 As historians have found region and nation to be less stable categories than previous generations allowed, some have turned to the tools of cultural geography to find more pliant theoretical models to describe the dimensions of lived experience. This spatial turn should have special resonance for historians of medicine, particularly those whose work spans the latter decades of the twentieth century, period during which changes in transportation and communications technology, economic globalization, transnational migration, and the rise of metropolitan centres, to name but few factors, have reconfigured, if not extinguished, Canada's traditional landscape-based regions (Friesen 2005, 6-7). Indeed, the history of health and medicine might become privileged site for analyses of these changing configurations. Through the long twentieth century, health care has remained key instrument of Canadian state formation. Landmark studies by Maureen Lux (2001) and Mary-Ellen KeIm (1998), for example, teach us how discourses about health, disease, and healing have been used to project and enforce new configurations on the Pacific Coast and on the Great Plains. These studies remind us that the implication of medicine within the colonial project is not just phenomenon of the nineteenth century, but also the twentieth. Too, with the emergence of health-care provision as state function, conversations about health have loomed large in the struggles between national and provincial governments. …