Canadian health-care historiography is in the throes of a renaissance. The hallmarks are plain: new journals, organizations, and gatherings; more and better books and articles; increasing numbers of established historians and social scientists directing their attention to the field; and, as heralded by the notices of theses completed, a new generation of academics emerging who will focus on medical historiography from the outset of their careers.

Until the last several years, most of the work published was in three broad categories: biography or autobiography; “house histories” of professions, hospitals, faculties, and professional organizations; and sketches of important scientific developments.¹ These...

The development of the modern welfare state, and more particularly the introduction of state-supported health insurance, is often seen in relation to the divergent intentions of competing interest groups. Such has been true of most treatments of the coming of medicare to Canada, where the competing and often shifting attitudes of organized labour, health reformers, politicians, medical organizations of various types, and civil-service bureaucrats are dissected in order to explain the timing of medicare’s introduction.¹ What is often missed in this approach is the relationship between state involvement in health matters, the emergence and rising authority of the scientific professions,...

In the wake of the First World War, insisted Dr J.L. Todd, McGill’s professor of parasitology, “it will be unbelievably easy to achieve social ideals which before the war seemed impracticable and impossible of achievement.”¹ A wartime major in the Canadian Army Medical Corps (CAMC), Todd was convinced that experience with military medicine would make a post-war system of state health insurance inevitable. Many of his fellow physicians in Canada and the United States agreed. Surely too many people had experienced a fully organized health system to go back to the old ways of individualism and neglect.

From August 1914,...

The impact of the Second World War upon the Canadian medical profession has not been seriously investigated. Yet for thousands of Canadian doctors and nurses the war was to be a major formative influence in their professional lives. Service in the armed forces brought medical professionals under direct state authority, and the military discipline imposed upon them required adaptation to life in a complex bureaucratic system that was quite unlike any other organization they had previously encountered. Adaptation was also required by the agency of the state that employed them, the Department of National Defence. This examination of the origin...

Many years before the introduction of insurance schemes, public hospitals in North America admitted a small number of private patients. This practice dated from the late nineteenth century, when modest advances in therapy encouraged hospitals to gain respectability and income by attracting the middle classes.¹ Private patients’ benefits included care from a physician of choice and less austere accommodation than was provided on the public wards. Private status conveyed an important additional privilege to families, that of daily access to sick relatives in a time when visiting for most patients was severely limited.² Such visiting practices were standard in all...

In 1906 Werner Sombart wrote a series of articles later republished under the titleWhy Is There No Socialism in the United States?¹ Since than, many have been perplexed by the question. A variety of answers have been offered: the wealth of the country discouraged it, socialism foundering on shoals of roast beef and apple pie; the conservatism of Catholic immigrant workers made them unresponsive to the socialist message; the doctrinaire Marxism of European-born socialists made them unsympathetic to indigenous versions of socialism and made American socialists unwilling to accept the European version; the socialist split with a large part...

Canada’s health-care system, although distinctive, contains elements recognizable to students of health care in the United States and the United Kingdom. At its core is a government-run insurance plan that uses public funds to pay for a private system. Medical care services are provided primarily by physicians trained in the North American style; indeed, Canadian and American medical schools are accredited by a common body. Patients have free choice of physicians, who in turn are paid by the provincial plans on a fee-for-service basis. Public hospitals receive most of their budgets directly from government. Although national health insurance is among...

Since the First World War Canadian governments at all levels have been extensively involved in efforts to cope with sexually transmitted disease (STD). Between 1918 and 1920 most provinces passed special legislation to control STD, with Prince Edward Island following suit in 1929. Their action was prompted by the high prevalence of venereal infection in both the general public and the armed forces before and during the Great War, and it rested on the recognition of a need for special legal powers and major resources of manpower, material, and money.¹ The statutes went through some revision, chiefly between 1936 and...

As part of the milestone social-security measures enacted by Parliament in 1966, the objectives set for the Medical Care Bill were to eliminate economic barriers in access to insured medical services and remove regional disparities in the provision of these services. The bill’s companion pieces tabled by the minority Liberal government were the Canada Assistance Plan, a 40 per cent increase in benefits under the Guaranteed Income Supplement for the Aged, and the Health Resources Fund bill, providing for an expansion of training resources for heath-sciences personnel and the construction of new hospitals and laboratories. Together with other measures, the...