Mobilizing Mercy: A History of the Canadian Red Cross by Sarah Glassford (review)

Charitable and voluntary organizations are powerful social institutions, and many play an important role in shaping the history of health care. In Mobilizing Mercy, Sarah Glassford provides the first book-length, scholarly study of one such institution, the Canadian Red Cross Society (CRCS). Founded to provided mobile medical support for troops in the First World War, Glassford traces its evolution through war and peace over more than a half century. Over six chapters we learn how the organization filled many gaps in government aid and public health, from creating the nation’s first blood transfusion service to offering swimming lessons for Canadian youth. Moving back and forth between the organizational story and the perspective provided by influential leaders, Glassford articulately charts the social, political, and economic changes in the CRCS structure and mandate, making astute assessments of how this national organization both cultivated and deployed a Red Cross “brand” to maintain relevance.

The organization continually tapped into the concerns of a wide range of key constituents across the voluntary health and social services landscape: middle-class women social reformers, education activists, clinicians in the armed forces, and government officials intent on creating a modern twentieth-century infrastructure for public health. Successful outreach meant the Canadian Red Cross Society could insert itself into many different and overlapping conversations about health, broadly defined, and authoritatively step in to influence the practical organization of services. In the interwar period, for instance, the CRCS continued to provide relief during periods of natural disaster, in the absence of regular and formal health service, and during epidemics.

The Second World War then refocused CRCS activities in support of the war effort, and the organization reached a high point of its status and institutional power. The activities of the largely female membership varied widely, and their history adds to our understanding of gender, work, and public life over these decades. Glassford industriously mined the local records of provincial Red Cross societies, uncovering many rich testimonials to CRCS volunteers’ work. Such records help us understand the affective and symbolic value of women’s wartime work, which underpinned the image of the Red Cross nurse that emerged and solidified at this time. Yet, the organization was engaged in a wide range of activities beyond nursing. Mobilizing Mercy is, in large part, a story of women in service work, including their struggle to carve out authoritative space in public life.

Over the final years of the Second World War, the Red Cross took up the challenge of blood collection in Canada to support of the mobile hospital service units with blood serum. After the war, the CRCS continued this work, supplying the technical services to collect and distribute blood across the country to Canadian hospitals. They were so successful that, in 1959, the Red Cross began to receive substantial provincial and federal government funding to support these activities. In the two decades after war’s end, Canadian health care was increasingly underwritten by the state, including blood services. In this context, the voluntary organization attempted to fit within the emerging national system of publicly funded hospital treatment, and then physician services in private practice. The ability of the CRCS to continually reinvent itself, to negotiate its “philanthropic scope of practice,” and to adapt to new environments and public concerns, was key to its longevity.

Glassford’s final chapter puts the CRCS at another crossroads, as the organization considered the challenges of reinventing itself for survival in late-twentieth-century Canada. Here, the discussion of CRCS activities and importance become more suggestive. A lack of secondary records hampered Glassford’s ability to assess the international work of the society, although she is able to describe in very broad terms the institutional framework that supported the “overseas humanitarian awakening” of the CRCS in the postwar decades (p. 244). She describes...