Body Failure: Medical Views of Women, 1900–1950 by Wendy Mitchinson (review)

Body Failure: Medical Views of Women, 1900–1950, by historian Wendy Mitchinson, provides a comprehensive overview of doctors’ views of women’s bodies in Canada in the first half of the twentieth century. Body Failure is a companion volume to Mitchinson’s nineteenth-century study, The Nature of Their Bodies: Women and Their Doctors in Victorian Canada (1991), and it complements her investigation of the history of childbirth, Giving Birth in Canada, 1900–1950 (2002). In Body Failure, Mitchinson investigates the medical perception and treatment of white women, and how doctors saw women’s bodies as different from and inferior to men’s bodies. She argues that reproduction, including women’s social roles as wife and mother, was central to how doctors understood womanhood and thus how they addressed women’s health concerns. According to Canadian doctors, the vast majority of whom were white males in this period, medical treatments needed to support what they saw as the reproductive purpose of women’s bodies.

Body Failure’s greatest strengths are the wide range of topics that Mitchinson examined and the rich primary source material she uncovered. She excavated a truly impressive wealth of information about a variety of women’s health issues across the life cycle. In a dozen chapters she covers the topics of puberty, menstruation, sexuality, breastfeeding, contraceptives, abortion, infertility, menopause, breast cancer, cervical cancer, and mental illness. The chapters build on material from over one hundred Canadian medical journals, which published both original articles and reprints from international journals. The chapters also draw on medical school textbooks, most of which were of American and British origin, and health literature in popular magazines, such as Chatelaine. In addition, Mitchinson gained access to hospital records, including annual reports and patient case files, and obtained material from interviews with twenty-two women. She gathered sources from most of the Canadian provinces to produce this national study, but her richest material came from Nova Scotia, Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia. Furthermore, the primary sources focused on health history in urban centers, in particular Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver.

Body Failure provides useful information on many important topics, yet there are some limitations to this study. Certainly, Mitchinson faced a formidable task in trying to organize and analyze such varied types of data from numerous communities across Canada. However, some of the generalizations about medical practice may not hold true for doctors treating women in northern and rural areas of Canada even in the same time period. In addition, issues of race and ethnicity remain underanalyzed. As Mitchinson acknowledges, this research examines mostly white, urban, English-speaking male practitioners and female patients. Although she does include a bit of information about indigenous women, new studies by scholars like Kristen Burnett and Laurie Meijer Drees offer more complexity to the story. Despite tremendous contributions made by scholars of Canadian nursing history, including Karen Flynn, there is still much more to be investigated regarding the multicultural history of women and health in Canada, especially among the Inuit, Metis, First Nations, African Canadians, and Asian Canadians. Finally, the book would have benefitted from the guidance of a good copyeditor.

Overall, Body Failure is a valuable resource on medical views of women’s health in Canada. It also addresses a number of key themes in medical history that transcend national boundaries, including issues of uncertainty, standardization, and the use of medical language. In the end, this study reminds us that medicine was, and still is, a profession engaged in constant debate, conjecture, and speculation about how gender shapes bodily differences.