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comptes rendus privé. La chronologie de l’évolution pour la France, en particulier les décrets
sanctionnant en 1922 les formations du « personnel secondaire des hôpitaux »
(p. 237) et en 1938 leur démocratisation, vont à l’encontre du modèle initial.
L’étude est relativement neuve et la structure de l’ouvrage plutôt inédite.
Après avoir retracé les éléments du modèle initial anglais, comme on pouvait
s’y attendre, et consacré deux chapitres au modèle américain qui en assurera
le développement, les auteures se penchent sur la France à partir d’une série
d’études de cas, dont le modèle républicain parisien, les initiatives d’Anna
Hamilton concernant son école de « gardes-malades » à Bordeaux, celles de
réformatrices protestantes et catholiques, etc. Les auteures ont bien montré que
la réforme du nursing « n’est ni synchronisée, ni centralisée, ni généralisée» (p.
313), bien que les réformatrices des pays étudiés aient placé sur les nurses une
semblable responsabilité sociale. Si l’affirmation selon laquelle le métier d’infirmière « a été inventé par des femmes, pour des femmes » (p. 317) mériterait discussion, il reste que l’étude de ce métier aussi crucial que paradoxal n’a pas fini
de surprendre. L’ouvrage est écrit sur le ton de l’explication intimiste, évoquant
les motivations et les actions des réformatrices au présent. Cela donne l’impression d’assister à leurs échanges, aux marques d’amitié et d’inimitié qu’elles se
portent et à leurs réactions devant les difficultés, comme s’il s’agissait de nos
propres réseaux socioprofessionnels.
On aurait souhaité quelques tableaux pour une présentation plus visuelle et
croisée des données biographiques et des réseaux infirmiers. La présence d’un
index est par contre fort utile. Les auteures en appellent à de nouvelles études
complémentaires et comparatistes sur le sujet, sans préciser cependant. Parmi
ces pistes, je vois pour ma part l’intérêt d’approfondir l’étude des modèles religieux de soins en regard du modèle professionnel, celle des implications de la
terminologie (infirmière, garde-malade, nurse, etc.) et celle des liens entre les
milieux de la réforme du nursing et de la philanthropie. D’autres espaces nationaux sont à considérer, notamment pour le Canada. La circulation d’un modèle
entre réformatrices appelle encore sa réception par les infirmières de la base. Ce
livre audacieux, original et savant renouvelle le propos et incite à revisiter ce
« devenir infirmière » à la fois universel et spécifique dont les répercussions se
prolongent dans l’actualité.
JOHANNE DAIGLE Université Laval
Opium: Reality’s Dark Dream
Thomas Dormandy
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012, x + 366 p., $40 (Cloth)
Thomas Dormandy’s book must be read with respect and caution. His is the
latest contribution to a long list of “biographies” of inanimate objects that range
from cod to salt. Yet nothing sparks the imagination more than opium, for the
drug promises both pleasure and danger, attracting a long list of biographers
such as J. M. Scott, Mark D. Merlin, and Martin Booth to name a few.
Opium is well written in a commendable style that appeals to the general
public. It has no less than 34 chapters plus an introduction and an epilogue.
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Following the fashion of many non-fiction books today, it is a compilation of
short fragments that do not always follow a linear story; as if authors no longer
expect the common reader to possess an attention span that would last more
than 10 pages devoted to a single topic. But, despite this objection, the end
result is excellent: the reader is exposed to a long history of opium and its derivatives from prehistory to modern times in short, concise, and entertaining bits.
The book is divided into two parts. The first is devoted to a brief history of
opium from the beginning of time to the early 19th century. The second part
deals with opium in the modern world, focusing on addiction and the ban of
the drug. That is why the author dedicates two chapters explaining the opium
economy of the 18th and 19th centuries in India and Turkey in the first part of
the book, but holds off his account of the Opium War to the second part, even
though all three episodes are intertwined.
After admiring the author’s attempt to write a book that spans a few millennia, suspicion must follow. Whereas readers must accept a few mistakes from an
ambitious endeavor of writing a short history of a vast topic, too many mistakes
can only mean inexcusable lax scholarship. In a similar fashion, one cannot
expect heavy documentation in such a book, or else it would be too long and
unreadable; but this does not excuse the author for incorrect citations.
As expected, Opium contains few notes, but the few that are available are too
often wrong. For example, Dormandy quotes a paragraph from a book titled The
Opium Appetite supposedly written in 1867 by Dr. Joseph Parrish – an influential
American drug expert who founded an inebriate sanatorium in Media, Pennsylvania (p. 182). Dormandy even provides a page number for the curious reader
who is interested in the original text. But, the reader would be disappointed to
find out that Parrish had never written a book with that title. In fact, the quote
Dormandy uses was lifted from a New York Times article “The Opium Habit’s
Power ” published a decade after, on 30 December 1877. Parrish was indeed
interviewed in that piece, but most of the quote in Opium should not be attributed to Parrish, but the journalist who interviewed him.
Lax scholarship can be forgiven, but Dormandy’s mistake hides a more serious problem, and that is a misunderstanding of addiction in the 19th century.
Prior to the 1870s, addiction was almost unknown, or at least a phenomenon
not touched by doctors. In fact, that was exactly what Parrish complained about
to the New York Times reporter in 1877. Yet, for Parrish to complain about addiction in 1867 would mean nothing but prescience, since he only established his
sanatorium for inebriates in June of that year, and the overwhelming majority of his patients were “addicted to the habit of drinking alcohol” rather than
addicted to the opium habit. Despite anachronistic reports after the fact, opium
and morphine were not considered a serious problem in America until a decade
after the Civil War had ended.
Dormandy’s misuse of quotes does not end there. In the same chapter, he
writes:
During the Civil War a prescient doctor wrote:
After the war more freedom would prevail but also more rootlessness and discontent …
The American dream of always searching for what is new and what is better is a noble
aspiration, it is what makes our nation the hope of the world; but oh how often it is bound
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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.