Alastair Compston, All Manner of Industry and Ingenuity. A Bio-Bibliography of Thomas Willis 1621–1675 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. xvi + 805, £99.99, hardback, ISBN: 9780198795391.

Abstract

immigration policy in favour of attracting ‘highly skilled manpower’ through a points-based system. While this successfully increasedmedical immigration to the country, it would be condemned as a global ‘brain drain’ of skilled individuals by Western countries, especially the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. This international discourse is the focus of Chapter 6 of the monograph, highlighting the criticisms levelled at industrialised countries which had absorbed nearly 90% of the world’s migrant physicians (p. 160). In Canada, this enabled the supplementation of rural and remote health regions with a growing foreign workforce of medical professionals. Two full chapters of the book provide intimate case studies of the development of unique health cultures in rural areas, with Chapter 8 comparing the examples of two resource towns: Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, and Thompson, Manitoba. The discussion finishes once again with domestic policy review of the novel incentive policies passed in the 1970s to relocate physicians towards underserved areas of the country. Mullally andWright employed comprehensive researchmethods for this work, with quantitative data forming a core part of the evidence. Using the Canadian Medical Directory, the annual returns of the federal Department of Immigration and Citizenship, multiple published reports from medical journals and an abundance of popular news and media resources, the authors compiled a substantial database regardingmigrant doctors, their countries of origin, counties of study, location of settlement and general demographic information. The statistics that emerged from these data provide a solid foundation for their assertations about the influx and outflow of medically trained individuals and highlight the quantitative impact of a ‘brain gain’ on Canadian medical practice and policy. However, the true strength of the work is the combined approach which supplements the hard statistics and policy discussions with the personal stories of men and women which were collected through oral interviews over several years. A glance through the sources demonstrates that this work was years in the making, and the authors took care to follow up on leads and contact numerous external individuals for added insight. One minor limitation to the qualitative content is the high ratio of male voices, which at times overshadows the contributions and experiences of foreign female medical professionals. Nonetheless, this is a significant work of history which does much to reconceptualise the narratives told about Canadian Medicare. Through its exploration of the ways that foreign-trained doctors settled into Canadian structures of medicine and subsequently moulded those structures over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, Foreign Practices provides a new framing for the national Medicare system, one which recognises the contributions of immigrant medical workers and marries the national belief of a homegrown system, with a multilayered transnational understanding.