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An innovative study of the struggle for healthy children in early twentieth-century Canada.
More people die by suicide each year than by homicide, wars, and terrorist attacks combined. Witnesses and survivors are left perplexed and troubled. Doctors, clinical psychologists, and social workers try to deal with it through their professional routines; sociologists and psychiatrists attempt to provide theoretical explanations of it. In a study of nearly 7000 suicides from 1900 to 1950 in New Zealand and Queensland, Australia, John Weaver documents the challenges that ordinary people experienced during turbulent times and, using witnesses' testimony, death bed statements, and suicide notes, reconstructs individuals' thoughts as they decide whether to endure their suffering. Bridging soc...
In 1990, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child declared that children's "survival, protection, growth and development in good health and with proper nutrition is the essential foundation of human development." Drawing from many disciplines - history, anthropology, demography, art history, disability studies, and sociology - and across a broad geography, Healing the World's Children sheds light on the medical, political, and cultural dimensions of the efforts to preserve and protect the lives of our most vulnerable citizens.
The first half of the twentieth century witnessed the creation of Canada's modern hospital system. While it is often assumed that this process was inevitable, many small communities had difficulty creating and maintaining public hospitals. In an era of government cutbacks in health services and comparisons with a more privatized American system, W.G. Godfrey offers a timely examination of Canada's hospital experience, showing that it was a slow journey from largely privately funded to increasingly governmentally funded institutions. Godfrey focuses on one hospital and the communities it served but also provides an overview of local, provincial, and federal hospital policies, revising the som...
What is the relationship between culture and mental health? Is mental illness universal? Are symptoms of mental disorders different across social groups? In the late 1960s these questions gave rise to a groundbreaking series of articles written by the psychiatrist Henri Ellenberger, who would go on to publish The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry in 1970. Fifty years later they are presented for the first time in English translation, introduced by historian of science Emmanuel Delille. Ethnopsychiatry explores one of the most controversial subjects in psychiatric research: the role of culture in mental health. In his articles Ellenberger addressed ...
Cheryl Wells provides an edited and fully annotated collection of Wafer's diary entries during the war, his letters home, and the memoirs he wrote after returning to Canada. Wafer's writings are a fascinating and deeply personal account of the actions, duties, feelings, and perceptions of a noncombatant who experienced the thick of battle and its grave consequences.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, celebrated Swiss physician Samuel Auguste Tissot (1728-1797) received over 1,200 medical consultation letters from across Europe and beyond. Written by individuals seeking respite from a range of ailments, these letters offer valuable insight into the nature of physical suffering. Plaintive, desperate, querulous, fearful, frustrated, and sometimes arrogant and self-interested in tone, the letters to Tissot not only express the struggle of individuals to understand the body and its workings, but also reveal the close connections between embodiment and politics. Through the process of writing letters to describe their ailments, the correspondents c...
In this book, Lori Brown examines the relationship between space, defined physically, legally and legislatively, and how these factors directly impact the spaces of abortion. It analyzes how various political entities shape the physical landscapes of inclusion and exclusion to reproductive healthcare access, and questions what architecture's responsibilities are in respect to this spatial conflict. Employing writing, drawing and mapping methodologies, this interdisciplinary project explores restrictions and legislatures which directly influence abortion policy in the US, Mexico and Canada. It questions how these legal rulings produce spatial complexities and why architecture isn't more cultu...
Assembling scholars from nursing, women's studies, geography, native studies, and history, this volume looks at the experience of nurses in Newfoundland and Labrador, northern Saskatchewan, northern British Columbia, and the Arctic and features essays on topics such as Mennonite midwives in Western Canada, missionary nurses, and Aboriginal nursing assistants in the Yukon. Contributors illuminate the larger themes of religion, colonialism, social divisions, and native-newcomer relations. Special attention is paid to nursing in Aboriginal communities and the relations of race to medical work, particularly in connection to ideas of British ethnicity and conceptualized meanings of "whiteness." An informative collection of fascinating works, Caregiving on the Periphery provides insight into the history of medicine in Canada and the long-established importance of women for the country's wellbeing.
Between the decriminalization of contraception in 1969 and the introduction of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, a landmark decade in the struggle for women's rights, public discourse about birth control and family planning was transformed. At the same time, a transnational conversation about the "population bomb" that threatened global famine caused by overpopulation embraced birth control technologies for a different set of reasons, revisiting controversial ideas about eugenics, heredity, and degeneration. In Challenging Choices Erika Dyck and Maureen Lux argue that reproductive politics in 1970s Canada were shaped by competing ideologies on global population control, poverty, pe...