Histoire Sociale. Social History

This article brings together historical questions about the nature of assimilation and the medicalization of migrants in the postwar era, with a focus on medical writings about migrant patients in Australia in the 1950s and 1960s. It argues that physicians adopted official assimilation ideologies to construct a "New Australian patient" whose beliefs and behaviours indicated a less sophisticated understanding of medicine, and who suffered particular psychosomatic illnesses and health risks linked to their migration, socioeconomic status, and linguistic isolation...

This article analyses the languages of wartime pain as seen in British and American memoirs from the American Civil War to the present. How did the rhetoric of wounding in these war memoirs change over time? One of the central shifts lies in the way that wounded men presented themselves as stoic in spite of severe wounding. From 1939, and in an even more dramatic fashion by the war in Vietnam, physical suffering remained a test of manliness, but the tone was defiant and aggressive rather than stoic or resigned...

In this paper we explore the broader policy determinants of the de-hospitalization of mental patients in Nova Scotia between the 1950s and 1980s and trace the background to the development of occupational rehabilitation programs in the community. For employment programs, the government chose to rely on non-profit NGOs as the suppliers of services. As a case study of such an organization, we examine the evolution of LakeCity Employment Services Association as a resource for people living with mental disabilities...

Psychiatry opens to the world at a time when the very basis of psychiatric practice, namely the asylum, is called into question. Studies appear in Quebec and Canadian journals concurrent to the introduction of new formulas for care, such as the delivery of psychiatric services in general hospitals and clinics, that allow patients to be treated outside the walls of psychiatric hospitals. In addition, postwar psychiatry takes an optimistic view toward the future of children with impairments through the creation of specialized schools and workshops...

Never is the fraught relationship between the state-run custodial mental hospital and its host community clearer than during the period of rapid deinstitutionalization, when communities, facing the closure of their mental health facilities, inserted themselves into debates about the proper configuration of the mental health care system. Using the case of Weyburn, Saskatchewan, site in the 1960s of one of Canada's earliest and most radical experiments in rapid institutional depopulation, this article explores the government of Saskatchewan's management of the conflict between the latent functions of the old-line mental hospital as a community institution, an employer, and a generator of economic activity with its manifest function as a site of care made obsolete by the shift to community models of care...

Defined as a set of distinct processes that included the declining use of large psychiatric institutions and the increasing use of outpatient services and general hospitals, deinstitutionalization occurred earlier in Saskatchewan than other provinces in Canada. It was led by a CCF government dedicated to major change across a number of sectors including mental health, assisted by one of the most influential and well-organized social movement organizations of the 1950s, the Saskatchewan Division of the Canadian Mental Health Association (SCMHA)...

This article offers a glimpse into the lives and activities of some of the patients, volunteers and staff in the Saskatchewan mental health system during the period of deinstitutionalization. Drawing on her own experience as a patient in psychiatric wards as well as ongoing research in the history of mental health, it features the role of Regina Volunteer Visitors in Saskatchewan Hospital, Weyburn and examines the importance of occupational and recreational therapies and activities in improving the lives of the patients in that institution...

During late 1951 and early 1952, married couple, social biologist Elaine Cumming and psychiatrist John Cumming, led a mental health education experiment in Indian Head, Saskatchewan. The study, which was intended to inform strategies toward deinstitutionalization, sought to determine if attitudes regarding mental illness could be changed through commonly used educational practices. It was shaped by the shared interests of powerful philanthropic, charitable, psychiatric, academic and governmental bodies to create healthier citizens and a stronger democratic nation through expert knowledge...

Using demographics on admission to, and discharge from, mental hospitals in Alberta and British Columbia, this paper analyzes the social process commonly framed as deinstitutionalization between 1950 and 1980. A focus on the two most western Canadian provinces permits an exploration of these changes in these regional contexts. Pressured by new funding arrangements, a shift towards community care, and growing criticism of the alleged oppressive nature of large institutions, the three main mental hospitals scaled down as of the 1950s...

This article on the first initiatives of social integration of the mentally ill, using the example of the Hôpital St-Jean-de-Dieu, explores the implementation of a period of deinstitutionalization in the early decades of the 20th century. Our study is situated in the recent historiography that offers a rereading of the period just prior to the Quiet Revolution in Quebec. We intend to contribute by demonstrating that the policies, strategies and practices of the Sisters of Providence and the psychiatrists of St-Jean-de-Dieu developed a system of deinstitutionalization that reintegrated patients into their family as early as the 1910s, half a century before the first wave of deinstitutionalization of the 1960s was orchestrated by the authors of the Bédard report...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Slum clearance and rebuilding first became a serious political project in Toronto during the 1930s. Following the release of a systematic housing survey known as the Bruce Report (1934), a set of actors distinguished by their planning authority with respect to social agencies, influence over social work education, coordination of social research, and role as spokespersons of religious bodies inaugurated a political struggle over state power. While the campaign failed, it called forth a reaction from established authorities and reconfigured the local political field as it related to low-income housing...

Changes occurring in Canadian society during the 1960s and 1970s were poorly reflected in the child-rearing advice directed to English-Canadian parents. Despite the rise in the number of women working outside the home and feminist calls for a more equitable division of child care, experts only sometimes modified their advice to acknowledge this reality. In addition, the creation of the welfare state seemed to encourage child-rearing advisors to ignore class disparities. Finally, experts in this period rarely acknowledged any racial diversity in the Canadian population, despite an increasingly multicultural society...

First Nations' perspectives on health and health care as delivered by doctors, nurses, and Canada's former Indian hospital system form a significant part of Canada's medical history, as well as a part of First Nations people's personal histories. Oral histories collected in Alberta and British Columbia suggest that First Nations people who experienced the Nanaimo and Charles Camsell Indian hospitals between 1945 and 1965 perceive the value of their experiences to be reflected in their survivance, a concept recalled through narratives emphasizing both humour and pain, as well as past and present personal resilience...

The first medical superintendent of the Toronto Lunatic Asylum, physician Dr. William Rees, found his tenure from 1841 to 1845 marked by financial struggle, extensive administrative conflict, and physical injury. His personality along with these events have given rise to negative portrayals of Rees as an inept administrator. Less known are his social contributions beyond his asylum work. A more extensive assessment of Rees suggests the value of his biography as a study of Upper Canadian professional and class status...

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No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.