Into the House of Old: A History of Residential Care in British Columbia (review)

Between 1943 and 1964, in an isolated forest along a river in the Fraser Valley, the Allco Provincial Infirmary operated as an old age facility for eighty aged men who were housed in about two dozen small stove-heated wooden shacks. Originally built as a logging camp and relief camp hospital, this location mirrored the isolation of people who historian Megan Davies notes were often literally 'hidden' away from society - in this instance, elderly, poor, single men. It was also one more example of the legacy of British poor laws which reflected lingering 'ghosts' about the 'deserving' and 'undeserving' poor in the treatment of old people in British Columbia. The 'deserving' poor included those for whom the first old age homes in BC were built in the 1890s - 'pioneers' who were among the early non-Aboriginal settlers. A common theme throughout this book is how British poor laws influenced this history. Moralizing and patronizing attitudes towards old people, rooted in poor laws, resurfaced repeatedly in internal practices and public attitudes towards residents of BC old age homes.

This book also provides important details about how class, gender, and ethnicity determined which old age home a person ended up in. However, it is in her discussion of the gender and class dynamic of this history that Davies provides the most striking evidence about who ended up where in the evolving old age residential care system in BC. Among the non-Aboriginal population, old men were far more numerous among inmates in residential care homes than old women. For every 100 women above the age of sixty-five in British Columbia, there were 174 men in the same category in 1901, a figure which did not come close to levelling off until the 1960s. This gender imbalance among the aged was due to the large numbers of men who worked in British Columbia's resource industries during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After they were no longer able to keep up the level of work they had done in their younger years, this group of men became 'aged and impoverished cast-offs of resource capitalism.' Their numbers were particularly evident among immigrants from Asia and the European continent. According to Davies, they constituted 'a generation of single men who faced old age with few financial resources, no family, and no secure place within a settled supportive community.' Some of them ended up in wretched places that were hardly appropriate for a person in their final years - like the Allco Infirmary. But Davies also notes that others - men and women both - found themselves in places that were more hospitable with caring staff.

There were also abusive and exploitative practices by some unscrupulous operators which led to increased state intervention in the inspection and running of these facilities. As the province became more active in overseeing old age homes, the nature of what had been largely privately run facilities, with some municipal involvement, changed significantly. Davies does a particularly good job of showing how the development of state social assistance for the elderly from 1927 on allowed more older people to secure some financial help to postpone committal to residential care, unlike many of the old people admitted prior to this time. This meant that this later group of old people who entered residential care did so to die, as their health was more precarious upon arrival than was that of their predecessors. Thus, these places became much more medicalized by the mid-twentieth century, when the 'inmates' became 'patients.' The author does an excellent job of examining the ideals and reality behind remaking old people's institutions into a 'home' during the last decades covered by this study. Middle-class professionals thought this idea, and its architectural manifestations, would be more inviting to the community to soften its image as an institution. But, Davies observes, these were cosmetic changes that sought to hide the less...