Essays in Honour of Michael Bliss: Figuring the Social (review)

This festschrift for Michael Bliss, who taught in the University of Toronto Department of History from 1968 until he retired in 2006, contains the work of eighteen contributors, primarily his former students, divided into thematic sections reflecting Bliss’s own interests within and beyond the academy. Approximately half the essays are in the history of medicine; others deal with business, politics, the state, religion, and the family. The editors see the volume as a reflection upon the writing of social history in Canada since the 1970s. It is a particular kind of social history. As Elsbeth Heaman explains, Bliss’s social history was not of the Annales school or of demography; he was interested in the social history of ideas, events, people’s lives, political, diplomatic, and constitutional activities. As his work shifted towards biographical studies in business, medicine, and politics, social history became subordinate to the biographical framework but never disappeared.

It is never easy to pigeonhole Bliss, John Fraser notes in his foreword; nor can the scholarship of his students be seen as an organic whole. They differ, not only in what they investigate but also in what they see as the historian’s role. Some are committed to social justice; others focus on business and politics. The editors nevertheless discern a common thread in these works, just as in Bliss’s – the significance of the individual life, the place of the individual in the social. ‘Figuring the Social’ evokes the relationship between social history and the subdisciplines of history included in the volume, how society is given concrete form through particular studies. It also hints at concern with economics, business, and financial pressures underlying many of the essays, as well as with the human body – the idea that people are physical as well as spiritual and social beings.

In myriad ways, these essays share a concern with the commonweal. In the section on business history, Ben Forster discounts efforts of historians to locate economic nationalism in the pre-Confederation period: He shows that A.T. Galt’s protectionism was not ideological or tied to a conception of nationality but was concerned with revenue because of the commercial depression his province was suffering in the 1850s. In his study of the commercialization of the Canadian media, Gene Allen finds that although there was a consistent tension between the public role of newspapers and their status as profitmaking businesses, they always spoke to readers as members of a public sphere. In the section on family and religion, in one of the collection’s finest contributions, David Marshall uses an intimate set of letters written by clergyman and novelist Charles Gordon to his son, King, to explore masculine domesticity. He shows how one family of ministers, over three generations, experienced a kind of secularization that reflected broader social and intellectual trends – not only within Christianity but in family, home life, and intergenerational dynamics. Secularization, Marshall argues, proceeded not in an obvious public way but with regret and anguish in the private confines of family negotiation. Veronica Strong-Boag, also examining the image of ‘father’ and drawing on her study of adoption in English Canada, uses four recurring images of Canadian birth and adoptive fathers to examine what were considered commonplace core criteria for responsible Canadian manhood and the representation of donor biological and adoptive fathers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Essays dealing with health and public policy, medical science and practice, demonstrate a similar interest in the public good. In an excellent article on home care for Canada’s aging veterans, 1977–2004, which bears on contemporary social policy concerns about the cost of caring for an aging society, James Struthers explores how Winnipeg was fertile ground in the 1960s for innovative experiments in home care and explains why veterans’ wives became central to sustaining a home care system. In his study of the Connaught Antitoxin Laboratories as a cornerstone...