{"title":"Paul Potter (3 April 1944-3 April 2025).","authors":"Jacalyn Duffin","doi":"10.3138/cjhh.42-2-12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/cjhh.42-2-12","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":520244,"journal":{"name":"Canadian journal of health history = Revue canadienne d'histoire de la sante","volume":"42 2","pages":"505-513"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145829770","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"Captain of the Citadel\": The Figure of the Mother across Wilder Penfield's Professional and Domestic Spheres.","authors":"Delia Gavrus","doi":"10.3138/cjhh.702-062024-02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/cjhh.702-062024-02","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article puts into conversation Wilder Penfield's correspondence with his mother, a novel about Hippocrates he published in 1960, and his work for the Vanier Institute of the Family. I argue that Penfield drew on an epistemology of personal experience in both medicine and family life to influence the conversation about social values and national and professional identity. Specifically, in threading connections between the medical family and the conventional family, he cast the mother/wife as a critically important figure who could help the doctor mediate between his professional and domestic worlds, while not herself being a protagonist in professional spaces. This article thus bridges the conceptual realms of the domestic and professional spheres, illuminating ideas and narratives of identity that were available to doctors and to Canadians and that shaped the cultural and professional landscapes of the twentieth century.</p>","PeriodicalId":520244,"journal":{"name":"Canadian journal of health history = Revue canadienne d'histoire de la sante","volume":"42 2","pages":"426-453"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145829759","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mothering Machines: The Promise of Infant Incubators in the Early Twentieth Century.","authors":"Vivien Hamilton","doi":"10.3138/cjhh.707-072024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/cjhh.707-072024","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Before incubators became a stable feature of hospital care for infants, North American audiences flocked to see tiny babies on display in incubator exhibits at fairs and carnivals. While the babies themselves were no doubt a draw, incubators also captured imaginations as symbols of scientific progress. Described as mechanical wombs, these medical machines were praised as substitute mothers, offering even better care to these babies than their own parents. Examining the popular media and medical discourse surrounding incubator shows, this paper explores the specific promise of the incubator as an artificial mother, asking why this technological replacement for mothers appeared so appealing to audiences in the first decade of the twentieth century. I argue that public health concerns about inexperienced mothers aligned with a medical construction of the uterus as delicate and faulty, motivating desires for a mechanical replacement for mothers' bodies and care. Biological mothers were replaced by a new technological system of incubators plus carefully supervised nursing, which together became a kind of artificial mother. This was a system deliberately modelled on chicken incubation, offering a eugenic promise of supervised human reproduction.</p>","PeriodicalId":520244,"journal":{"name":"Canadian journal of health history = Revue canadienne d'histoire de la sante","volume":"42 2","pages":"337-361"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145829771","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: Mothering, Medicine, and Health.","authors":"Annmarie Adams, Delia Gavrus, Vivien Hamilton","doi":"10.3138/cjhh.750-052025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/cjhh.750-052025","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":520244,"journal":{"name":"Canadian journal of health history = Revue canadienne d'histoire de la sante","volume":"42 2","pages":"241-253"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145829749","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Place and Space in the Letters of Wilder Penfield and Jean Jefferson Penfield.","authors":"Annmarie Adams","doi":"10.3138/cjhh.702-062024-01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/cjhh.702-062024-01","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This essay explores letters between the neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield and his mother, Jean Jefferson Penfield, from his childhood to her death in 1935. I probe the role of the maternal bond in the famous physician's life to theorize this highly distinctive and understudied genre: mother-son correspondence. My focus is on references to place and space, a deep interest that the duo shared. Sharp architectural descriptions, including colours, decoration, furniture, and the condition of building materials, I argue, were ways the mother and son placed each other, while thousands of miles apart, akin to the way we might take selfies today, capturing a meaningful setting.</p>","PeriodicalId":520244,"journal":{"name":"Canadian journal of health history = Revue canadienne d'histoire de la sante","volume":"42 2","pages":"399-425"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145829761","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"<i>Dhai</i>, Ayah, and Anglo-Indian Mother: Rivalry in the Nursery in Nineteenth-Century British India.","authors":"John McBratney","doi":"10.3138/cjhh.701-062024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/cjhh.701-062024","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In nineteenth-century British India, the Anglo-Indian mother and the female Indian servants hired to help her with nursing and childcare were seen as potential rivals in the nursery. In the late nineteenth century, a divide in the discourse of nursing opened between, on one hand, medical handbooks and domestic guides preferring the Anglo-Indian mother, if healthy, to the <i>dhai</i> (Indian wet nurse) or ayah (Indian nursemaid) as a provider of milk to her infants and, on the other, Anglo-Indian fictional works by Rudyard Kipling and Sara Jeannette Duncan elevating the <i>dhai</i> or ayah above her British counterpart as a source of early maternal sustenance, particularly for sons. In these fictional narratives, the <i>dhai</i> or the bottle-feeding nursemaid is seen as a beneficial figure, whose milk (whether mammary or bottled) supplies to Anglo-Indian sons not only physical robustness but also an intuitive understanding of Indian cultures crucial to their efficacy as future imperial rulers. In these narratives, male Anglo-Indian infants, nourished by Indian milk and endowed by birth with British \"blood,\" possess a quasi-biological hybridity that putatively ensures both an acculturation to native mores and an inborn loyalty to the British Raj that will allow them to serve, in adulthood, as model civil servants or army officers. These fictional works, moreover, reconceive the idea of motherhood: the eclipse of the Anglo-Indian mother, who is dead or simply ineffectual, and the temporary promotion of the <i>dhai</i> or ayah to maternal surrogate and facilitator of continued imperial dominance at a time of rising Indian nationalism.</p>","PeriodicalId":520244,"journal":{"name":"Canadian journal of health history = Revue canadienne d'histoire de la sante","volume":"42 2","pages":"295-318"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145829754","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mobilizing Mothers and Empowering Women: Comprehensive Rural Health Projects in India and Bangladesh.","authors":"Stuart W Leslie","doi":"10.3138/cjhh.706-062024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/cjhh.706-062024","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Many global health experts, then and now, would agree with Colin McCord's 1976 assessment that \"the application of the rural health centre concept around the world has to be one of the most dismal records of failure in the history of medicine.\" This article focuses on two important exceptions, successful and enduring rural health care projects begun in India and Bangladesh in the early 1970s. It draws on newly available archival sources to show how local physicians built comprehensive rural health care projects from the bottom up, funded by international NGOs but administratively independent of them. Where previous studies primarily explore rural health care <i>for</i> mothers and children, this one looks at village mothers as health care providers, trained to care for their own communities.</p>","PeriodicalId":520244,"journal":{"name":"Canadian journal of health history = Revue canadienne d'histoire de la sante","volume":"42 2","pages":"454-480"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145829780","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"Who Were the 'Experts' Here Anyway?\": Mothering, Architecture, and Terminal Illness in Oxford, 1978-95.","authors":"Fiona L Kenney","doi":"10.3138/cjhh.704-062024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/cjhh.704-062024","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper presents a significant case study in the history of care architecture. It illustrates how the work of care, mothering, and architectural production can be inextricably linked - albeit often invisibly. It builds on the scholarship of Annmarie Adams and Cynthia Hammond, who have each argued that certain groups of women, historically credited only with domestic, medical, or caring skills, also had significant spatial knowledge and influence. Helen House (Oxford, UK, 1982) was the first paediatric hospice in the world. Designed by architect John Bicknell of Bicknell and Hamilton (London, UK) and accommodating eight children at a time, the house was named for Helen Worswick, a child who, at two years old, was found to have a brain tumour. In this paper, I tell the story of Helen House from the perspective of its architecture, specifically tracing the contributions of Helen's mother Jacqueline, Helen House founder Sister Frances Dominica Ritchie, and Helen herself. First, like Adams and Hammond before me, I demonstrate that the story of Helen House and paediatric hospice care is yet another where non-architect women carers were deeply involved in creating architecture. Second, I suggest that even down to the name, Helen House leveraged domesticity and mothers' expertise to create a more palliative architecture for children with life-limiting illness - reinforcing the long-running image of the domestic sphere as a woman's, more specifically a mother's, domain. Finally, I argue that the creation, design, and building of Helen House served as a testing ground for the new care philosophy, allowing it to grow and come into its own spatially, functionally, and theoretically.</p>","PeriodicalId":520244,"journal":{"name":"Canadian journal of health history = Revue canadienne d'histoire de la sante","volume":"42 2","pages":"481-504"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145829769","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Barbara Natalie Clow (1959-2025): A Tribute to a Fellow Medical Historian (and More).","authors":"J T H Connor","doi":"10.3138/cjhh.42.1.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/cjhh.42.1.8","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":520244,"journal":{"name":"Canadian journal of health history = Revue canadienne d'histoire de la sante","volume":"42 1","pages":"212-215"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144289723","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Canada and the Netherlands: Rhetoric versus Reality in the Evolution of Solidarity Underpinning Universal Health Coverage.","authors":"Gregory P Marchildon, Roland Bertens","doi":"10.3138/cjhh.685-012024","DOIUrl":"10.3138/cjhh.685-012024","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Since the mid-twentieth century, the shared goal of healthcare systems of Canada and the Netherlands has been to achieve broad healthcare access and coverage for citizens despite their health system differences. However, the rhetoric of \"state\" control in Canada and \"market\" control in the Netherlands belies very different realities in both countries. A longer historical perspective uncovers the discrepancies between the rhetoric and reality of solidarity that has emerged - and still exists - in both countries. In Canada, universal healthcare is historically seen as an important cultural cornerstone to be facilitated by the state as a public good in the context of institutional paralysis. In contrast, the Dutch system is historically predicated on an ideology of limited state control and healthcare provision by private parties. Yet the historical development of the system shows an ever-growing influence of the state in ensuring universal access to a continually broadening range of health services.</p>","PeriodicalId":520244,"journal":{"name":"Canadian journal of health history = Revue canadienne d'histoire de la sante","volume":" ","pages":"155-181"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143019971","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}