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Lose weight. Quit smoking. Exercise more. For over a century, governments and voluntary groups have run educational campaigns encouraging Canadians to adopt healthy habits in order to prolong lives, cost the state less, and produce more efficient workers. Be Wise! Be Healthy! explores the history of public health in Canada from the 1920s to the 1970s. Through the Health League of Canada, people were urged to drink pasteurized milk, immunize their children, and avoid extramarital sex. Health was presented as a responsibility of citizenship – and doctors and dentists as expert guides. Public health campaigns have reduced preventable deaths. But such campaigns can also stigmatize marginalized populations by implying that poor health is due to inadequate self-care, despite clear links between health and external factors such as poverty and trauma. This clear-eyed study demonstrates that while we may well celebrate the successes of public health campaigns, they are not without controversy.
When patients visit a clinic or hospital, they bring stories of the everyday life conditions that made them sick in the first place – stories about where they work, live, and play; stories about income, food security, and housing. Doctors today are listening. Personal stories and patient encounters illuminate the social determinants of health, that is, the upstream source of what too often become complex, painful, and expensive downstream problems. Upstream Medicine features interviews by medical students and residents with leading physicians whose practices bring evidence-based, upstream ideas to life. They show how we can change the practice of medicine to build a healthier society.
Throughout history, farm families have shared work and equipment with their neighbours to complete labour-intensive, time-sensitive, and time-consuming tasks. They benefitted materially and socially from these voluntary, flexible, loosely structured networks of reciprocal assistance, making neighbourliness a vital but overlooked aspect of agricultural change. Being Neighbours takes us into the heart of neighbourhood – the set of people near and surrounding the family – through an examination of work bees in southern Ontario from 1830 to 1960. The bee was a special event where people gathered to work on a neighbour’s farm like bees in a hive for a wide variety of purposes, including bar...
The manufacturing of a chronic food crisis Food insecurity in the North is one of Canada’s most shameful public health and human rights crises. In Plundering the North, Kristin Burnett and Travis Hay examine the disturbing mechanics behind the origins of this crisis: state and corporate intervention in northern Indigenous foodways. Despite claims to the contrary by governments, the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), and the contemporary North West Company (NWC), the exorbitant cost of food in the North is neither a naturally occurring phenomenon nor the result of free-market forces. Rather, inflated food prices are the direct result of government policies and corporate monopolies. Using food as...
"An intellectual autobiography by Peter Brown, one of the most eminent historians of the last 50 years, who is credited with having created the field of study know as Late Antiquity, the period during which Rome fell, the three major monotheistic religions took shape, and Christianity spread across Europe situating it in the major developments in historiography and the study of the religion in the 20th century and the minds behind them"--
Oral health is integral to wellbeing and quality of life. This important edited volume brings together leading scholars to address global oral health and the multiple ways in which theory, practice and discourse have shaped it in the modern period. Structured around key themes, the book chapters draw on interdisciplinary perspectives in order to consider the role of the dental profession, the commercial sector, charities, the state, the media and patients in shaping oral health in the past and present. Collectively, the chapters consider the extent to which each of the studied groups and actors have sought to own and control the mouth. By adopting multiple perspectives, the book highlights the importance of cross-disciplinary work across the sciences, social sciences and humanities and provides a road map for a new interdisciplinary field focused on oral health and society. Drawing on perspectives from dentistry, sociology, history and the wider humanities, this book will interest students and researchers of dentistry, public health, sociology of health and illness, the medical humanities and history.
As recently as fifty years ago most people expected to lose their teeth as they aged. Few children benefited from braces to straighten their teeth, and cosmetic procedures to change the appearance of smiles were largely unknown. Today, many Canadians enjoy straight, white teeth and far more of them are keeping their teeth for the entirety of their lives. Yet these advances have not reached everyone. The Smile Gap examines the enormous improvements that have taken place over the past century. The use of fluorides, emphasis on toothbrushing, the rise of cosmetic dentistry, and better access to dental care have had a profound effect on the oral health and beauty of Canadians. Yet while the intr...
In the 1950s, the causal link between smoking and lung cancer surfaced in medical journals and mainstream media. Yet the best years for the Canadian cigarette industry were still to come, as per capita cigarette consumption rose steadily in the 1960s and 1970s. In Cigarette Nation, Daniel Robinson examines the vibrant and contentious history of smoking to discover why Canadians continued to light up despite the publicized health risks. Highlighting the prolific marketing and advertising practices that helped make smoking a staple of everyday life, Robinson explores socio-cultural aspects of cigarette use from the 1930s to the 1950s and recounts the views and actions of tobacco executives, go...
Medicare is arguably Canada’s most valued social program. As federally-supported medicare enters its second half-century, Medicare’s Histories brings together leading social and health historians to reflect on the origins and evolution of medicare and the missed opportunities characterizing its past and present. Embedding medicare in the diverse constituencies that have given it existence and meaning, contributors inquire into the strengths and weaknesses of publicly insured health care and critically examine medicare’s unfinished role in achieving greater health equity for all people in Canada regardless of race, status, gender, class, age, and ability. Fundamental to the stories told...