McGill Medicine (review)

Founded on an Edinburgh model, Montreal’s McGill University medical school is the oldest center of physician training in Canada and it enjoys an outstanding international reputation. Prior histories are incomplete, dated, and out of print. A former dean and a neurologist alumnus have joined forces to write the present volume, which is intended to summarize and add to the scattered earlier works. A second volume will cover the period 1886–1930.

The book’s strengths are its readable chronology, only one hundred pages long, and a wealth of superbly reproduced documents and portraits. The authors have made conscientious use of archival material pertaining to their history, but, as they readily admit, the earliest years are not well represented, and they have been obliged to resort to the information available in older secondary sources. The several appendices may be of most interest to scholars because they provide the names of the graduates, prize winners, and professors, with the titles of their appointments, for the entire period covered, as well as examination questions from the year 1854/55.

The book shares the weaknesses of many institutional histories produced by devoted amateurs. The continued survival of McGill is clearly the only acceptable outcome in this presentation of events: all actors who strive toward those ends take on the unquestioned stature of heroes; the final chapter is a tribute to William Osler’s influence in shaping the foundations of a scientific pathology. The authors are a little unfair to the predecessors on whom they rely so heavily (e.g., Maude Abbott’s “post-Victorian literary style” [p. 189]). Yet, they seem to have overlooked other studies of Quebec medicine, both recent and old: for example, G. Ahern, J. T. H. Connor, S. McRae, H. N. Segall, and especially the francophone historians Jacques Bernier, E. Desjardins, Denis Goulet, Sylvio Leblond, and André Paradis. An examination of any of these works might have dispelled and corrected the “assumptions” that they feel obliged to make due to lack of information (e.g., about clinical practice [p. 39]). Montreal’s 1885 smallpox epidemic, recently studied by Michael Bliss, is not mentioned; one can only assume that this epidemic will be used to open volume 2. Although their work is handsomely produced by a leading scholarly press, the authors have been poorly served by their editors. This reader’s confidence is shaken by frequent repetition in notes and text and by numerous typographic errors and inconsistencies.

This narrative chronology has no pretensions to analysis; the authors rarely attempt to situate the events in political and social terms—for example, no background is given to explain the intrigue that led anglophone dissenters of McGill to found Montreal’s “French” school of medicine in 1843. Some contributory details are to be found scattered in the lengthy section of biographical sketches (pp. 143–88); unfortunately, this material is entirely unattributed and, one suspects, taken directly from the earlier works, such as Abbott and J. J. Heagerty (often misspelled “Haegerty”). Nevertheless, this volume provides an updated start on a history that has heretofore been told only in bits and pieces. Because of McGill’s long-standing preeminence in Canadian medicine, it will be a useful orientation for those who are interested in the history of medical education—provided that they also remember to consult the many other cited and uncited works.