Hannah Institute Research Articles

Taking the Pulse: New Books in the History of Health and Medicine in Canada

J.B. Collip and the Development of Medical Research in Canada: Extracts and Enterprise. By Alison Li. McGill-Queen's/Associated Medical Services Studies in the History of Medicine, Health, and Society no. 18. Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003. 256 pp. $55.00 (cloth) ISBN 9780773526099. Women, Health, and Nation: Canada and the United States since 1945. Ed. Georgina Feldberg, Molly Ladd-Taylor, Alison Li, and Kathryn McPherson. McGill-Queen's/ Associated Medical Services Studies in the History of Medicine, Health, and Society no. 16. Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003. 448 pp. $80.00 (cloth) ISBN 9780773525009. $29.95 (paper) ISBN 9780773525016. An Element of Hope: Radium and the Response to Cancer in Canada, 1900-1940. By Charles Hayter. McGill-Queen's/Associated Medical Services Studies in the History of Medicine, Health and Society no. 22. Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005. 288 pp. $70.00 (cloth) ISBN 9780773528697. The Struggle to Serve: A History of the Moncton Hospital, 1895-1953. By W.G. Godfrey. McGill-Queen's/Associated Medical Services Studies in the History of Medicine, Health, and Society no. 21. Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2004. 256 pp. $75.00 (cloth) ISBN 9780773525122. Nutrition Policy in Canada, 1870-1939. By Aleck Ostry. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006. 160 pp. $85.00 (cloth) ISBN 9780774813273. $34.95 (paper) ISBN 9780774813280. Aboriginal Health in Canada: Historical, Cultural, and Epidemiological Perspectives. 2nd ed. By James B. Waldram, D. Ann Herring, and T. Kue Young. 2006. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. 352 pp. $70.00 (cloth) ISBN 0802087922. $29.95 (paper) ISBN 0802085792. The social history of medicine in Canada is healthy and fit, judging by the new titles published in the past few years. Scholars have developed important new work that widens and deepens the historiography. Moreover, these new books also address the history of some of the most pressing health concerns today: medical research, transnational studies of women's health, cancer and its treatment, hospitals and health-care funding, diet and nutrition, and the history of Aboriginal health. Historians of medicine in Canada are fortunate to have solid publishing support from the partnership of McGill-Queen's University Press and Associated Medical Services (Hannah Institute) in their Studies in the History of Medicine, Health, and Society series, which published all but two of the titles under consideration. The Hannah Institute also provides generous research funding for students and scholars in the history of medicine. Such substantial assistance is rare for scholars in Canada and bodes well for the continued strength of the field. The books reviewed below all address the historic roots of contemporary health-care issues. Although historians are generally cautious about applying the lessons of the past to current concerns, they will agree that understanding something about how things came to be may indeed illuminate how things might be changed. Medical research in Canada today is a multi-million dollar enterprise, but its roots are humble. Alison Li's J.B. Collip and the Development of Medical Research in Canada charts this history by linking the major events in one man's career to the bigger story of the development of institutional research in Canada. Frederick Grant Banting and Charles Best, as the developers of insulin, are familiar to most Canadians, but the other member of the team, J.B. Bert Collip is not so well-known. Collip was the young biochemist who purified the extract and made the development of insulin possible. Alison Li's book is not so much the biography of a man as it is the story of a career that spanned the most important developments in medical research in Canada. Collip was one of the few who were able to earn a PhD in Canada at the University of Toronto before the First World War. …

Book Notes

Leslie A. Clarkson and E. Margaret Crawford, eds. Famine and Disease in Ireland. 5 vols. Vol. 1: General Introduction; William Robert Wills Wilde, The Census of Ireland for the Year 1851, part V: Tables of Deaths (1856). Vol. 2: Charles E. Trevelyan, The Irish Crisis (1848); The Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medical Science (1849) (excerpts). Vol. 3: Francis Barker and John Cheyne, An Account of the Rise, Progress, and Decline of the Fever lately Epidemical in Ireland (2 vols., 1821), vol. 1. Vol. 4: Francis Barker and John Cheyne, An Account of the Rise, Progress, and Decline of the Fever lately Epidemical in Ireland (2 vols., 1821), vol. 2. Vol. 5: [Jonathan Swift], A Short View of the State of Ireland (1727–28); John Rutty, A Chronological History of the Weather and Seasons, and of the Prevailing Diseases in Dublin (1770); William Harty, An Historic Sketch of the Causes, Progress, Extent, and Mortality of the Contagious Fever Epidemic in Ireland during the Years 1817, 1818, and 1819 (1920) (excerpt); index. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005. Vol. 1: xxxii + 555 pp. (facsimiles); Vol. 2: viii + 330 pp. (facsimiles); Vol. 3: viii + 531 pp. (facsimiles); Vol. 4: 387 pp. (facsimiles); Vol. 5: ix + 517 pp. (facsimiles). Set: $750.00 (1-85196-791-5). The facsimiles in this collection lead up to and include the Great Famine in Ireland in the years 1845–49, but the editors emphasize the documents' relevance to the contemporary world: "Although famine was largely in retreat from the western parts of Europe by the early nineteenth century, it lingered in the east for decades thereafter. In Asia and Africa it still occurs with tragic consequences. The experiences in these regions display at least some of the features evident in Ireland up to the mid-nineteenth century" (1: xiii). The editors conclude that "the social structure of Ireland made the community vulnerable to famine whenever events—weather, warfare, plant disease—conspired to destroy food supplies. Whenever governments responded to the social dislocation caused by famine and disease, the range of actions they adopted was not unlike those seen today" (1: xxix). Volume 1 begins with the editors' preface; it and the other volumes contain the facsimiles themselves, with chronologies of the authors' lives and works, bibliographies, and notes. The Editors Andrew Marshall and Judith Marshall. Striving for the Comfort Zone: A Perspective on Julius Jeffreys. Dallas, Tex.: Windy Knoll Publications, 2004. xiii + 177 pp. Ill. $29.95 (0-9754695-0-9). Julius Jeffreys (1800–1877) was a physician, an anatomist, a businessman, a traveler. His main professional interest was in improving the climate for individuals. His work ranged from major efforts to improve conditions for "recuperating soldiers [End Page 400] in the Indian Army" (p. xi) to "encouraging friends and relatives to move to unpolluted regions of the world" (p. xi). This biography mixes the personal and the professional. Chapters move chronologically from Jeffreys's background (ancestors, parents, siblings) to his work in India; his first marriage; his development of the respirator (which, according to the authors, was a word coined by Jeffreys himself, to identify a device for warming inhaled breath [p. xii]); his book Views upon the Statics of the Human Chest, published in 1843; his second marriage; his work with the British Army in India; his semiretirement; and his legacy. Although the biography is not framed by any contextual discussion of Jeffreys and his work, it brings to view a then-notable figure in nineteenth-century British medicine and science. The Editors Peter L. Twohig. Labour in the Laboratory: Medical Laboratory Workers in the Maritimes, 1900–1950. McGill-Queen's Associated Medical Services (Hannah Institute) Studies in the History of Medicine, no. 23. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005. xxi + 241 pp. Ill. $70.00 (0-7735-2861-X). "Few historians of the Atlantic region have turned their attention to the history of health despite a flourishing regional scholarship," writes the author of this book, which intends to put health-care...

David A. E. Shephard. <italic>Island Doctor: John Mackieson and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Prince Edward Island.</italic> (McGill-Queen's/Associated Medical Services [Hannah Institute] Studies in the History of Medicine, number 20.) Ithaca, N.Y.: McGill-Queen's University Press. 2003. Pp. xxviii, 187. $44.95

Journal Article David A. E. Shephard. Island Doctor: John Mackieson and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Prince Edward Island. (McGill-Queen's/Associated Medical Services [Hannah Institute] Studies in the History of Medicine, number 20.) Ithaca, N.Y.: McGill-Queen's University Press. 2003. Pp. xxviii, 187. $44.95 Get access Shephard David A. E.. Island Doctor: John Mackieson and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Prince Edward Island. (McGill-Queen's/Associated Medical Services [Hannah Institute] Studies in the History of Medicine, number 20.) Ithaca, N.Y.: McGill-Queen's University Press. 2003. Pp. xxviii, 187. $44.95. Wendy Mitchinson Wendy Mitchinson University of Waterloo Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 110, Issue 2, April 2005, Pages 460–461, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/110.2.460 Published: 01 April 2005

David Gagan and Rosemary R. Gagan. <italic>For Patients of Moderate Means: A Social History of the Voluntary Public General Hospital in Canada, 1890–1950</italic>. (McGill-Queen's Associate Medical Services [Hannah Institute] Studies in the History of Medicine, Health, and Society, number 13.) Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press. 2002. Pp. xi, 268. $49.95

David Gagan and Rosemary R. Gagan. For Patients of Moderate Means: A Social History of the Voluntary Public General Hospital in Canada, 1890–1950. (McGill-Queen's Associate Medical Services [Hannah Institute] Studies in the History of Medicine, Health, and Society, number 13.) Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press. 2002. Pp. xi, 268. $49.95 Get access Gagan David and Gagan Rosemary R.. For Patients of Moderate Means: A Social History of the Voluntary Public General Hospital in Canada, 1890–1950. (McGill-Queen's Associate Medical Services [Hannah Institute] Studies in the History of Medicine, Health, and Society, number 13.) Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press. 2002. Pp. xi, 268. $49.95. Wendy Mitchinson Wendy Mitchinson University of Waterloo Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 109, Issue 1, February 2004, Pages 171–172, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/109.1.171 Published: 01 February 2004

George Emery and J. C. Herbert Emery. <italic>A Young Man's Benefit: The Independent Order of Odd Fellows and Sickness Insurance in the United States and Canada, 1860–1929</italic>. (McGill-Queen's/Associated Medical Services [Hannah Institute] studies in the History of Medicine, Health, and Society, number 7.) Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press. 1999. Pp. xv, 184. $55.00

George Emery and J. C. Herbert Emery. <italic>A Young Man's Benefit: The Independent Order of Odd Fellows and Sickness Insurance in the United States and Canada, 1860–1929</italic>. (McGill-Queen's/Associated Medical Services [Hannah Institute] studies in the History of Medicine, Health, and Society, number 7.) Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press. 1999. Pp. xv, 184. $55.00

Representations of Maritime Cultures and Histories: A Review Essay

Representations of Maritime Cultures and Histories: A Review Essay Canadians at Last: Canada integrates Newfoundland as a Province. Raymond B. Blake. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Home Medicine: Newfound-land Experience. John K. Crellin, McGill-- Queen's/Hannah Institute Studies in History of Medicine, Health, and Society. 1. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1994. Quest of Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in TwentiethCentury Nova Scotia. Ian McKay. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1994. Tenant League of Prince Edward Island 1864-1867. Lease-hold Tenure in New World. Ian Ross Robertson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. Labrador Odyssey@ journal and Photographs of Eliot Curwen on Second Voyage of Wilfred Grenfell, 1893. Ronald Rompkey, ed. McGill-Queen's/Hannah Institute Studies in History of Medicine, Health, and Society. 3. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996. This decade has seen a rising national and international interest in cultures and histories of Atlantic Canada. This attention - most conspicuously manifest in popularity of such contemporary artistic events as Shipping News, Margaret's Museum and Celtic music revival - perhaps signifies that a certain romantic nostalgia for simpler life lingers in popular imagination. In academic world, nostalgia is taking a reflexive turn, being acknowledged as an element at work in hermeneutics of texts and events. Such reflexivity is particularly evident in Ian McKay's Quest of and Ronald Rompkey's Labrador Odyssey, both of which offer alternatives to founding fictions that have worked to efface histories of at least some Atlantic Canadians. These texts foreground representation of culture, challenging us to read against historical and folkloric constructions of societies and their identities. They ask that we acknowledge subject positions of historical narratives and question processes behind what we are asked to read as culture. It is this reading practice that informs my own comments on five diverse accounts of maritime histories and cultures offered in Quest of Labrador Odyssey, Home Medicine, Canadians at Last and Tenant League of Prince Edward Island. McKay's Quest of examines antimodernist impulse at work in processes of selection and invention in twentieth-century Nova Scotia. Its thesis is interesting and adversarial: The Folk, as category and construction, reduces people once alive to status of inert essences and voids the emancipatory potential of historical knowledge (xvi). What is perhaps most contentious is not argument itself, but representation of cultural producers such as Helen Creighton as aesthetic colonizers who actively sought and produced according to their own romantic impulses: This book is about path of destiny that led Creighton and countless other figures to develop the Folk as key to understanding Nova Scotian culture and history. It is about ways in which urban producers, pursuing their own interests and expressing their own view of things, constructed of countryside as romantic antithesis to everything they disliked about modern urban and industrial life. (4) Its five chapters contextualize concept of explore Creighton's role in development of maritime folklore, examine commodification and discourse of Innocence, and survey idea of under postmodern conditions (30). In its demystification of interpretative framework and construction of culture and identity, Quest of revises twentieth-century Nova Scotian history and calls for a questioning of ways in which a politics of selection has made certain debatable assumptions seem like 'natural' commonsense (40). …

Labrador Odyssey: The Journal and Photographs of Eliot Curwen on the Second Voyage of Wilfred Grenfell, 1893 (review)

Reviewed by: Labrador Odyssey: The Journal and Photographs of Eliot Curwen on the Second Voyage of Wilfred Grenfell, 1893 Jacalyn Duffin Ronald Rompkey, ed. Labrador Odyssey: The Journal and Photographs of Eliot Curwen on the Second Voyage of Wilfred Grenfell, 1893. McGill Queen’s/Hannah Institute Studies in the History of Medicine, Health, and Society. Montreal: McGill Queen’s University Press, 1996. xxxix + 231 pp. Ill. $29.95. The fabled Grenfell mission to the natives and deep-sea fishermen of Newfoundland and Labrador began in 1892 when the British-born and -educated physician [End Page 542] Wilfred Grenfell spent three months exploring the coast, surveying the population, providing care, and contemplating the region’s need for medical missionaries. An evangelical Christian, Grenfell was sent as an agent of a new London charity, the nondenominational Mission to the Deep-Sea Fishermen (MDSF) supported by his teacher, the surgeon Frederick Treves (of appendectomy and “Elephant Man” fame). The following year, hospitals were established at Indian Harbour and Battle Harbour, Labrador. Other sites were developed, including Grenfell’s headquarters at St. Anthony on the great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland, where a descendant institution bearing his name still operates. Grenfell soon broke with his funding agency to found his own mission, which became a worthy charity for Britons and Canadians. By the testimony of his writings and that of others, Grenfell was a hero; more recently, however, the motives, accomplishments, and legacy of Grenfell and like-minded evangelists have been revisited by novelists, filmmakers, and scholars of whom Rompkey is one. The present volume is a handsome transcription of the diary of Dr. Eliot Curwen, who spent from May to late November 1893 in Newfoundland and Labrador during Grenfell’s second voyage. With nurses, Curwen was to help establish the new hospitals and provide both religious support and medical care from a roving base on board ship. His diary was sent home in installments to his family; together with his notebook and photographs, it has been carefully preserved by his descendants. Curwen’s prose is disarming for its wonder and frustration: excited sightings of icebergs; amazement at the weather; satisfaction with well-attended prayer meetings; bewilderment at the reticent Newfoundland character; anxiety over the long journeys to the inland sick; happy encounters with the other Europeans and the natives who lived along the coast; and his constant refrain about the potential “to do much good.” The statistics tend to suggest that the mission was more successful in its religious endeavors than its medical: large numbers at church services contrast with the smaller numbers of patients, which rarely exceeded two hundred in a month. Rompkey’s introduction and reference notes are concise and useful. The work is illustrated with Curwen’s remarkable photographs of the very people and dwellings described in his diary, and it is amplified by transcriptions of contemporaneous letters and reports by Grenfell and his associates to Treves and MDSF officials. Grenfell’s reports refer to medicine almost as a backdrop to his swashbuckling accounts of fishing, hunting, and navigation, while Curwen’s occasional remarks about the unreasonable drive of the energetic leader seem to support the revisionist school of thought. But, as the diary makes quite clear, caring for the inhabitants was exhausting and time-consuming. They may not have suffered from life-threatening diseases, but rather from grinding poverty, limited resources, and the brutal climate, which brought the devastations of isolation, exposure, starvation, suicide, and infanticide. These real problems provide a powerful explanation for the fund-raising zeal of Grenfell and the MDSF to improve life in Labrador. [End Page 543] Rompkey has brought a fascinating primary source to serve historians of Newfoundland, of medicine, and of evangelical movements—be they medical or religious. Jacalyn Duffin Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario Copyright © 1997 The Johns Hopkins University Press

A Long Way from Home: The Tuberculosis Epidemic among the Inuit (review)

Reviewed by: A Long Way from Home: The Tuberculosis Epidemic among the Inuit Leonard G. Wilson Pat Sandiford Grygier. A Long Way from Home: The Tuberculosis Epidemic among the Inuit. McGill—Queen’s/Hannah Institute Studies in the History of Medicine, Health and Society, no. 2. Montreal: McGill—Queen’s University Press, 1994. xxiv + 233 pp. Ill. $34.95. Pat Grygier—a clinical psychologist by training, now retired from the Public Service Commission of Canada—has written a moving, sometimes shocking history of the Canadian government’s effort to combat tuberculosis among the Inuit (Eskimo) population in the Canadian Arctic since the end of World War II. Her account is based on extensive research in both published and archival sources and on interviews with surviving participants in the campaign. The Canadian Arctic is a vast area of interspersed land and sea—peninsulas, islands, and inland seas, like Hudson Bay—extending more than 2,500 miles east to west, from the coast of Labrador to the Beaufort Sea, and a similar distance from the southern shore of Hudson Bay to the Queen Elizabeth Islands a few hundred miles from the North Pole. Along the shores of this immense land some ten to eleven thousand Inuit lived formerly in small hunting groups, dwelling through the short Arctic summer in skin tents and through the long, dark winter in igloos. The isolation of Inuit communities made them particularly susceptible [End Page 745] to epidemics of infectious diseases. During the summer the arrival of a ship at a remote community was followed typically by an epidemic of colds and bronchitis, and sometimes of tuberculosis. Following the arrival of a ship at Coppermine on Coronation Gulf in 1929, the government medical officer, Dr. R. D. Martin, watched tuberculosis spread rapidly among the neighboring Inuit groups, until by 1931 a quarter of the people were dying annually. Although he made strenuous efforts to isolate and care for patients with active tuberculosis, the epidemic was beyond his slender resources. The close confinement of Inuit families within igloos during the winter ensured the rapid transmission of the tubercle bacillus from an individual to other members of the family. When Dr. Martin appealed urgently to his superiors at Ottawa for a hospital at Coppermine in which to isolate tuberculosis patients, they ignored his requests and terminated his appointment. During the 1930s tuberculosis ravaged the Inuit throughout the Canadian Arctic, and tuberculosis mortality among them rose to the highest recorded level in the world. Not until 1945 did the Canadian government act to control tuberculosis among the Inuit, and then their action, though effective, was brutal: instead of establishing tuberculosis hospitals in the Arctic, they conducted mass chest X-ray surveys among the Inuit and forcibly sent Inuit patients with active tuberculosis to sanatoria thousands of miles to the south. Police took patients abruptly from their communities without telling them where they were to be sent; they separated children from parents. The patients usually did not speak English, and sanatorium staffs in southern Canada did not know the Inuit language, Inuktitut. The patients did not know where they were, nor what was to happen to them. Their despair can only be imagined. Yet, in its rough way, the removal of tuberculosis patients from Eskimo communities did lower tuberculosis mortality and reduce the incidence of the disease very rapidly. The prompt removal of people who were sources of infection and their thorough treatment were undoubtedly essential to the decline. Unfortunately, in view of the suffering described by Grygier, as recently as 1986 tuberculosis continued to occur among Inuit at a rate twenty-four times higher than in the population of Canada as a whole. 1 The reason appears to lie in the geographical separation of tuberculosis treatment from where the Inuit live. If the Northern Medical Service of Canada is to eradicate tuberculosis from the Inuit, it needs to have several hospitals distributed across the Arctic, where Inuit patients may be treated by staff who speak their language and understand the conditions of their life. Such hospitals might also serve as bases from which tuberculosis surveillance teams could travel to isolated communities to administer tuberculin tests and chest X rays. Positive...

Healing Traditions: Alternative Medicine and the Health Professions, and: Nature Doctors: Pioneers in Naturopathic Medicine, and: Home Medicine: The Newfoundland Experience (review)

Reviewed by: Healing Traditions: Alternative Medicine and the Health Professions, and: Nature Doctors: Pioneers in Naturopathic Medicine, and: Home Medicine: The Newfoundland Experience James Whorton Bonnie Blair O’Connor. Healing Traditions: Alternative Medicine and the Health Professions. Studies in Health, Illness, and Caregiving; and Publications of the American Folklore Society, new series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. xxiii + 287 pp. $36.95 (cloth); $16.95 (paperbound). Friedhelm Kirchfeld and Wade Boyle. Nature Doctors: Pioneers in Naturopathic Medicine. Portland, Ore.: Medicina Biologica, and East Palestine, Ohio: Buckeye Naturopathic Press, 1994. x + 351 pp. Ill. $29.95 (paperbound). John K. Crellin. Home Medicine: The Newfoundland Experience. McGill—Queen’s/Hannah Institute Studies in the History of Medicine, Health and Society, no. 1. Montreal: McGill—Queen’s University Press, 1994. 280 pp. Ill. $44.95 (cloth); $17.95 (paperbound). The “immediate message” of Healing Traditions, O’Connor states in her concluding chapter, “is that nonbiomedical health belief systems are alive and well” (p. 161), and need to be taken into account by practitioners of the biomedical model of therapy. That message, of course, has become virtually a mantra in the last two years, in the aftermath of the article by David Eisenberg et al. in the New England Journal of Medicine pointing out the “enormous presence” of unconventional medicine in the United States. 1 These books all add to that renewed awareness of the pervasiveness of healing subcultures: two through tightly confined discussions, and O’Connor’s through an analysis directed at alternative medicine in general. [End Page 562] Nature Doctors is intended as the first book-length English history of naturopathy. As the subtitle indicates, however, it presents that history in the form of biographical sketches. Beginning with Priessnitz, and proceeding through Kneipp, Lust, and more than a dozen other figures down to John Bastyr, the recently deceased American “father of modern naturopathic medicine” (p. vi), Kirchfeld outlines the lives and work of the most important European and New World contributors to the philosophy and practice of nature cure, quoting liberally from the works of each. The outlines are uncritically reverential, to be sure: the “restless pilgrim for truth” and the “man of great compassion, keen intellect, and towering moral strength” (pp. 4, 29) are the only nature physicians inhabiting these pages. Their inspirational stories are valuable nonetheless for including a considerable quantity of factual data on ideas, therapies, and publications that allow the reader to piece together a chronology of the major stages of development of naturopathy, and even to discern an evolution of the philosophy of natural healing. The analytical limitations of the book notwithstanding, this will be a highly useful reference for historians interested in the past of alternative medicine, and, as Kirchfeld hopes, it can provide the foundation for a badly needed interpretive history of naturopathy’s development. A dominant theme in naturopathy, as well as in other alternative medical philosophies, is “patient, heal thyself.” Crellin’s encyclopedic survey of self-care traditions in Newfoundland, narrow as its focus appears to be, offers broadly applicable insight into the core of folk medical beliefs and practices that forms the historical basis for patients’ assumption of responsibility for their own recovery. Part 1 of the book is a narrative exploration of the course of domestic medicine in Newfoundland, set within the context of the province’s twentieth-century social history. The much lengthier part 2 presents the substance of domestic practice in the format of an alphabetical list and explanation of specific ailments, beliefs, practices, and remedies (herbs, minerals, patent medicines) gleaned from both folklore archives and interviews. There are well over one hundred entries between Abortion and Zam-Buk Ointment—many of them common to the rest of the hemisphere, some (“seal finger,” for example) not likely to be met with outside Newfoundland. Yet taken as a body, all these items document the historical persistence of lay confidence that effective medical decisions can often be made without the intervention of a professional. The significance of patient autonomy for the present flourishing of alternative medicine, and its implications for the training and clinical behavior of physicians and other health workers, is one of the larger themes of O’Connor...

Book Reviews

Journal Article Book Reviews Get access DOUGLAS WAUGH. Maudie of McGill: Dr. Maude Abbott and the Foundations of Heart Surgery. Toronto, Hannah Institute and Dundurn Press, 1992. 142 pp. Can. $17.99. JACALYN DUFFIN, M.D., D.SC. JACALYN DUFFIN, M.D., D.SC. Hannah Professor History of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Queen's UniversityKingston, Ontario, Canada, K71 3N6 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Volume 49, Issue 1, January 1994, Pages 133–136, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/49.1.133 Published: 01 January 1994

CLARENCE HINCKS, MENTAL HEALTH CRUSADER. 1989. By Charles G. Roland. Published by Hannah Institute & Dundurn Press. 128 pages. $17.95 Cdn.

CLARENCE HINCKS, MENTAL HEALTH CRUSADER. 1989. By Charles G. Roland. Published by Hannah Institute & Dundurn Press. 128 pages. $17.95 Cdn.

John B. Neilson and G. R. Paterson, Associated Medical Services, Incorporated: a history, Toronto, Associated Medical Services and the Hannah Institute for the History of Medicine, 1987, 8vo, pp. 445, illus., $15.00.

John B. Neilson and G. R. Paterson, Associated Medical Services, Incorporated: a history, Toronto, Associated Medical Services and the Hannah Institute for the History of Medicine, 1987, 8vo, pp. 445, illus., $15.00. - Volume 33 Issue 1

Some professional and political events in Canadian neurosurgery.

The Hannah Institute for the History of Medicine and Science, with the Royal College’s Section on the History of Medicine, asked me for a contribution to the Annual Meeting (1984) in Montreal dealing with the history of Canadian neurosurgery. I soon discovered that the material available to me, from my own files and from colleagues who sent me information, was too extensive for a paper of the required length. I have therefore excluded from this article the balanced review of the scientific and clinical contributions of Canadians in neurosurgery that I had hoped to prepare. What remains is a collection of events and developments that have involved or interested me during my career.

Book Notices

Book Notices Get access WILLIAM CANNIFF. The Medical Profession in Upper Canada 1783–1850. Reprint of the 1894 edition with a new introduction by Charles G. Roland. Toronto, Hannah Institute for the History of Medicine, 1980. [xiv], 688 pp., illus. Can. $24.95. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Volume XXXVII, Issue 1, January 1982, Pages 116-b–116, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/XXXVII.1.116-b Published: 01 January 1982

A report of some activities of the Hannah Institute for the History of Medicine

A report of some activities of the Hannah Institute for the History of Medicine

Liquid manure as a grassland fertilizer:V. The response to mixtures of liquid manure (urine) and dung

1. A small-scale plot experiment was conducted at the Hannah Institute for the 3-year period 1963–65, to study the comparative effect of applications of various mixtures of dung and urine (slurry treatments) on the yield and quality of an established S23 ryegrass and S100 white clover sward.

The response of grass-clover and pure-grass leys to irrigation and fertilizer nitrogen treatment. II. Clover and fertilizer nitrogen effects

1. The effects of irrigation and fertilizer nitrogen treatments on four swards were studied for 3 years in an experiment at the Hannah Institute. This paper describes only the effects of the fertilizer nitrogen treatments and their interactions with the presence or absence of clover in the sward, since those of the irrigation treatments have been reported previously.2. Annual applications of 0, 104, 208 or 312 lb. of fertilizer nitrogen per acre were made on swards of S 23 rye-grass or S 37 cocksfoot with or without S100 white clover.3. The yields of the grass + clover swards exceeded those of the pure-grass swards at all fertilizer nitrogen application rates in the first 2 years and at the 0 and 104 lb./acre rates in the third year.

The response of grass-clover and pure-grass leys to irrigation and fertilizer nitrogen treatment. I. Irrigation effects

1. In an experiment conducted at the Hannah Institute the effects of irrigation and fertilizer nitrogen treatments on four sward types were studied for 3 years. The swards were S 23 perennial rye-grass with S 100 white clover, S 23 rye-grass alone, S 37 cocksfoot with S 100 white clover, and S 37 cocksfoot alone.2. The irrigation treatments were—a control (no water) treatment, and two treatments which were irrigated to planned deficit levels of 2 or 0·5 in. below field capacity.

Composition of whales' milk.

IT has been possible to obtain eight samples of whales' milk for analysis through the very willing co-operation and help of Dr. E. Downing and Mr. J. A. B. Athey, of Chr. Salvesen and Co., Leith, and Dr. J. G. Sharp, of the Low Temperature Research Station, Cambridge. Two of the samples were from blue whales (Balœnoptera musculus) and the remainder from fin whales (Balœnoptera physalus). The milks were collected after dissection of the mammary glands during the flensing operation on board Salvesen and Co.'s factory ships Southern Venturer and Southern Harvester engaged in pelagic whaling in the Antarctic. The period between the death of the whales and the collection of the milk varied from 6 hr. for sample 7 to 19 hr. for sample 4. The samples were stored in glass bottles at a temperature of - 20° C. while on board ship and ashore, before being conveyed to the Hannah Institute with as little rise in temperature as possible. At the Hannah Institute the samples were kept at 4° C. and analysed without delay. Samples 1–3 were at a temperature of - 20° C. for six to seven months and samples 4–8 for two to three months.

Scientific Adviser to the Ministry of Food: Dr. N. C. Wright

Dr. N. C. Wright, director since 1928 of the Hannah Dairy Research Institute, Ayr, has recently been appointed to succeed Sir Jack Drummond as scientific adviser to the Ministry of Food, being seconded during the period of this appointment from the directorship of the Institute. Dr. Wright is a graduate of Oxford, and during his post-graduate training, carried out research in biochemistry at Cambridge, at the National Institute for Research in Dairying, Shinfield, and in the United States, where he held a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship during 1926–28. While at Shinfield, he investigated, with Mr. W. L. Little, the etiology of milk fever in cattle. These investigators were the first to point out the fall in blood calcium accompanying this disease, a discovery which laid the foundation for the modern method of treatment. Dr. Wright was appointed first director of the Hannah Institute in 1928, and the noteworthy progress of that Institute has been largely due to his efforts. He and his collaborators have, among other researches, examined the influence of heat on the behaviour of milk proteins, the mechanism of the secretion of calcium, phosphorus and other milk constituents by the mammary gland, the differences in biological value for milk secretion of various mixtures of food proteins in common use in the rations of dairy cows, and they have made valuable contributions to knowledge in each of these fields.