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Ordering the Bath: Children, Health, and Hygiene in Northern Canadian Communities, 1900–1970
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
All of the pupils in the Public School in Fernie were sent in groups to the old Fernie Hospital (under guard so we didn’t run away) to be vaccinated against smallpox . We stood in line in the hallway of the hospital and stepped up to a long table one at a time with our arms bared. A huge man by the name of Dr. Corson scraped your arm with a small knife and put some serum in the cuts. A light bandage was then put on the arm and you were sent back to school.63 This memory testifies to the fact that vaccination was, at times, not only physically painful but also psychologically difficult, reminding children of their often-debilitating powerlessness in the midst of medical “expertise.” Medical school inspectors did not actually treat the children they diagnosed. It was up to parents to seek out treatment. The rhetoric of public health officials positioned parents as real obstacles to children’s good health.64 In order to improve parental compliance, school nurses were charged with the task of visiting the homes of children in need of treatment.65 In the late 1920s, school medical inspectors typically placed the lion’s share of work publicizing the health message on their shoulders : “By home visiting, nurses discover the reasons for lack of treatment and so are able to deal with the cases…home visits afford the nurses many opportunities for teaching health and hygiene…in many ways our nurses are the social workers for the schools.”66 Nurses themselves characterized such outreach as challenging. Foremost was the recurring need to provide assistance for low-income and poor households to make them approximate middle-class standards of health care. This could well require charity. As a school nurse in Vancouver in 1916 reported, “Although a great deal of parents are unable to afford even the simplest of treatments, we are able to a certain extent to overcome this difficulty through the kindness of the different specialists in the city.”67 The irony inherent in admonishing mothers and fathers to provide treatment that they could not afford went unnoticed. Grinding poverty and/or lack of choices were never tackled as a root of parental reluctance. For Mary Jong, one of many Chinese Canadians whose families settled in Armstrong, BC, over the course of the nineteenth century, the inculcation of “Canadian” standards of health and cleanliness was both racist and exclusionary. She remembered her teacher’s disciplining techniques with heartbreaking clarity. Students’ hands, hair, and clothes would be routinely checked and passes and failures firmly separated. “Clean” students would receive stars. “My row always came in last,” Mary recalled, “because of me…everyone blamed me and didn’t want me in their group…how could they know that I had to work in the vegetable garden every morning before school and didn’t have time to clean up?”68 Unacknowledged here, except as cause for punishment, was the fact that work, both paid and unpaid, was a routine part of childhood for 298 MONA GLEASON many youngsters. Most particularly, labour on the part of poor immigrant youngsters was critical to the well-being of many families.69 Conclusion The interest of public health reformers in shaping attitudes towards healthy children was inextricably bound up in concerns about racial and class “contagion.” School medical inspection, and the considerable social surveillance and disciplining it made possible, enabled white middle-class professionals, primarily but not exclusively male, to infuse notions of “health” with the values and priorities of white middle-class and urban British Columbia. In both form and content, school medical inspections in British Columbia over the turn of the century conveyed powerful messages about “healthy” and “unhealthy” children. In the memories of some children, encounters with health professionals and with health imperatives were coloured by fear and/or racial and class discrimination. For other children, the provision of health services in schools was woefully inadequate or completely absent. The reports of school medical inspectors around the province make clear that their services varied widely in frequency, thoroughness, and, indeed, aims. Some school medical inspectors set out to improve the health of children in their jurisdiction; others merely sought out contagion as the end goal; others sought to use standards of health to discipline subordinate groups. For most, a mixture of motives held sway. Far from simply signalling the triumph of sanitary science, school medical inspection was a powerful means of legitimizing existing relations of...