this PDF file - Bulletin canadien d`histoire de la médecine

CBMH 30.1_Book Reviews Apr 25 2013 19:30:58 220 Page 220
book reviews
/
comptes rendus to disappoint. And for consolation in our disappointment what will be easier than to reach
for the blessed drug of oblivion?” (p. 185)
Once more, Dormandy fails to provide a correct note, leading the curious reader
to a non-existing page in Howard Wayne Morgan’s excellent book Drugs in
America. So, who is this prescient doctor, and what did he write? A thorough
reading of Morgan’s book might shed some light on these questions:
On the eve of the Civil War, a prescient doctor outlines the sources of what the next generation called neurasthenia. In his view American’s vaunted sense of individualism easily
“tends to self-indulgence and excess.” Freedom also caused rootlessness and the “discontented spirit” so evident in a national life built on striving after ever-expanding and
unattainable goals. The sensational press emphasized the vivid, sudden, and ephemeral,
which enhanced this restlessness. And there was a perceptible loosening of institutional
controls that would cast the individual adrift in the sea of social change, and make him
more likely than ever before to turn to stimulants or depressants.1
The prescient doctor was Charles H. Bas, who had written in the Atlanta Medical and Surgical Journal in 1859—two years prior to the Civil War—about why
Americans were unhealthy. Drugs were not the cause, but poor child rearing,
ruthless competiveness, hard work, and the freedom that the American system
of governance offered. Unruliness made Americans make a habit of smoking
tobacco, eating opium and drinking alcohol in excess.2
How Bas’ ‘stimulants and depressants’ turned into Dormandy’s “drugs of
oblivion” is anyone’s guess. Although, I may daresay that a sense of sensationalism probably found its way into Opium. If one is willing to disregard these
faults, Opium is highly recommended. It does contain interesting facts, which
are nicely parceled for the wondering and wandering mind. But if you decide
to read it, treat it with respect and caution.
JONATHAN LEWY Harvard University
Notes
1 H. Wayne Morgan, Drugs in America: A Social History, 1800–1980 (Syracuse: Syracuse
University Press, 1981), p. 47-48.
2 Charles H. Bas, “Why Are We Not a Healthy People?” Atlanta Medical and Surgical
Journal 5 (December 1859): 197-207.
Restoring the Spirit: The Beginnings of Occupational Therapy in Canada,
1890-1930
Judith Friedland
Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011, 328 p., $95.00
(Cloth), $39.95 (Paper)
According to Judith Friedland, occupational therapists in interwar Canada
elected to forget their discipline’s deep roots in popular social and political
movements, an amnesia that allowed them better to function within prevailing
medical models of care, but one which elided earlier approaches that emphasized treating not just the specific pathology, but rather the person as a whole.
CBMH 30.1_Book Reviews Apr 25 2013 19:30:58 book reviews
/
comptes rendus Page 221
221
Her goal in writing this book, however, is more ambitious than to draw attention to the profession’s intellectual inheritance. Rather, she casts occupational
therapy as a potential regenerator, capable of broadening the medical model
itself to comprise concern for the complex physical, social, and spiritual requirements for individual well-being.
Friedland’s project is to write a history of occupational therapy before it
became a coherent profession, and her account is teleological, processing with
certainty past the benchmarks of professional standing. The first section of the
book comprises a series of brief genealogical chapters that explore four contexts
which she argues informed the subsequent development of the profession: the
use of occupations in mental hospitals, the Arts and Crafts movement, the Settlement House movement, and campaigns for manual and technical training in
schools. She follows these chapters with short biographies of three “pioneering
women” whom she claims as exemplars of what she earlier calls an “unborn
profession.” The context established, the heart of Friedland’s narrative begins
with the First World War, and she identifies the progenitors of modern occupational therapy as the Ward Aides, a cohort of women drawn largely from the
upper echelons of Anglo-Canadian society who found their vocation restoring
convalescent soldiers to physical and spiritual health. For these women, who
often had formal education in fine arts and handicrafts, wartime work in occupations confirmed their status as career-minded New Women because it gave
them the opportunity to contribute to the war effort by doing “real” rather than
charitable work. And unlike the imagined alternative of nursing, it met with the
approval of their parents and social peers because it did not require body work
unbefitting their station.
Despite broad-based interest in the Ward Aide program, courses offered at
the University of Toronto and McGill in 1918 and 1919 were not continued.
By the mid-1920s the majority of Ward Aides had turned to homemaking and
philanthropic work, and only a handful remained active. The ongoing need for
rehabilitative services and enthusiasm on the part of physicians for occupational
and related forms of adjunctive therapy, however, resulted in renewed efforts
in the 1920s to constitute a profession. It is here that the reader comes face to
face with the central contradiction of the book. While she wishes to construct
a heroic narrative of pioneering women, Friedland offers evidence that occupational therapy was a profession that was largely absent at its own creation
and remained substantially under physician control until the 1960s. Where she
scratches the surface, she finds little evidence of female leadership and few of
the hallmarks of a self-regulating profession. Instead, it is a group of well-placed
male patrons, primarily physicians, who dominate the early professional associations, organizations created not so much to promote the interests of occupational therapists as interest in occupational therapy. Similarly, the Canadian
Journal of Occupational Therapy, founded in 1933, was edited by a physician for its
first two decades, and much of the content was contributed by and directed at
physicians. This is a fascinating discovery that contributes to our understanding
of the rapidly evolving mid-20th-century hospital labour complex. It also offers
a suitable introduction to the last section of the book, which examines some of
the conceptual conflicts and inter-occupational rivalries that beset occupational
therapy in the formative years. Although brief, this is in some respects the most
CBMH 30.1_Book Reviews Apr 25 2013 19:30:58 222 Page 222
book reviews
/
comptes rendus interesting section of the book, concerned as it is with philosophy, knowledge
production, and the co-evolution of cognate disciplines.
Occupational therapists are likely to be engaged by Friedland’s work and
to find it accessible and useful. She makes a compelling argument about the
largely submerged inheritance of the profession and the potential to mobilize
that tradition to transform paradigms of care. Her presentism and instrumental
use of history will be welcomed by those seeking a legitimating professional
narrative, as will her efforts to identify early and exemplary practitioners. Historians will likely be slower to embrace this book on account of its whiggish
tone and lack of engagement with the wider scholarship on the history of the
health professions. Part of this might be laid at the feet of McGill-Queen’s, who
might have provided more editorial support to a non-historian. This is particularly evident in the opening chapter, which is weakly referenced, replete with
anachronism, and contains jarring errors like the suggestion that the Western
provinces lagged behind the Maritimes on women’s suffrage. Historians are
not, however, Friedland’s audience, and above all what she wishes to convey is
a sense of the possibilities that may have been attenuated by a profession that
cleaved too closely to the medical model and relied too heavily on the patronage
of male physicians. In this, she succeeds.
CHRIS DOOLEY University of Winnipeg
Between Text and Patient. The Medical Enterprise in Medieval & Early
Modern Europe
Florence Eliza Glaze et Brian K. Nance, éd.
Florence, Micrologus’ Library 19, SISMEL, Edizioni des Galluzzo, 2011, 572 p.,
32 planches, €72.
Cet ensemble de 21 articles offerts à Michael McVaugh lors d’un colloque en
son honneur, à Chapel Hill en Caroline du Nord, en 2007 pourrait devenir une
institution du genre tant l’originalité des études et des textes proposés forme
une anthologie réfléchie. On y trouve une remarquable cohérence par la présentation de textes inédits ou peu connus et par le traitement qui en est fait ;
celui de montrer la dialectique qui s’établit entre milieux de production et mise
en texte des savoirs médicaux. D’emblée, les éditeurs soulignent qu’ils furent
agréablement surpris de la réponse faite à leur appel à communication. C’est
évidemment la figure emblématique de Michael McVaugh qui a réussi à fédérer
autant de convergence et d’enthousiasme de la part des plus éminents chercheurs du domaine. L’introduction d’ailleurs fait une large place au professeur
McVaugh en retraçant les jalons de sa longue et prolifique carrière. On trouve
en fin d’ouvrage, la liste complète de ses publications. Le format du compte
rendu ne pourra rendre la véritable dimension de chacun des articles de cette
volumineuse compilation de 572 pages. On devra se contenter de recenser les
auteurs, les textes et les sujets afin d’inciter à la lecture de cet immense ouvrage.
La première partie rassemble des communications sur la médecine dans les
contextes monastique, scolastique et urbain. Constantin l’Africain a fait l’objet
de plusieurs siècles de diatribe pour avoir apposé son nom sur ses multiples
traductions d’auteurs arabes. Prologues, textes, manuscrits et culture matérielle