The authors Gerald Thomas, Cynthia Comacchio, and Mona Gleason focus their articles on how health experts of the past have defined health standards and what a healthy child should be. An underlying problem that was routinely identified within these articles was discrimination imbedded in health standards and practices. Thomson, for example, focuses his article on Josephine Dauphinee’s activism to embed eugenics into the education system through the segregation of, what he classified as, feeble-minded children.[1] Dauphinee defined feeble-minded children as those who were unable to execute common sense, make intellectual decisions and judgements, and displayed learning disabilities.[2]   Additionally, Dauphinee also lobbied for sexual sterilization of these feeble-minded individuals.[3] Racism is prevalent within Dauphinee’s efforts as she believed in a strong Anglo-white majority in British Columbia and because eugenics itself was “caused by deep-seated Anglo-progressive fears of non-Anglo immigrant populations”[4]. She fuelled society’s fears by saying that class segregation and sexual sterilization were necessary to prevent pauperism, vagrancy, and crime.[5] Gleason’s article also contributes to the race, as well as class, subordination and its impact on the equality of education. Gleason analyzes how school medical inspections and the health standards they implemented from 1890 to 1930 were used to demonize people of lower classes and non-Anglo races to protect the greater public health.[6] Gleason argues that races such as the Chinese and Natives were seen as filthy and disease carriers and were non-cooperative towards modern treatments health officials were attempting to enforce.[7] Due to these views, these non-Anglo races were viewed as a general threat of spreading diseases within the Anglo-white majority. Lower classes also faced similar treatment because children would often attend school not meeting the school standards of health and cleanliness because they were dirty from work they had to do beforehand.[8] Some lower-class families also couldn’t afford mandatory immunizations for their children[9]. Consequently, children from these backgrounds were penalized by not being permitted to attend school or were isolated and bullied by their teachers and peers.[10] Comacchio, on the other hand, takes another approach by focussing more on the different effects of age and gender on health within youth. In her article, she argued puberty is viewed as a problem for females, addressing it as the female problem.[11] Puberty for women was viewed as a time of being predisposed to health difficulties that affected their education and work while for men, puberty was associated with “manliness” that emphasized their new physical strength and dominance.[12] Adolescence was seen as a time of “’physical and mental anarchy’” where youth deal with anxiety and alienation however, women would never fully overcome this stage and attain “the same level as the fully developed male”.[13] Similar to Thomson and Gleason’s articles, Comacchio also addressed that lower classes were also predisposed to poor health because of the long work hours and heavy labour associated with it. [14] In conclusion, the purpose of these three articles was to enlighten the historian on how different factors of discrimination were carried out under the guise of health care. Ultimately, these health standards and practices reinforced the subordination of lower classes and non-Anglo races.

[1] Gerald, Thomson, “Through no fault of their own’: Josephine Dauphinee and the ‘Subnormal’ Pupils of the Vancouver School System, 1911-1941,” Historical Studies in Education 18, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 51.

[2]Ibid., 52.

[3] Ibid., 51.

[4]Ibid., 54 & 57.

[5] Ibid., 64.

[6] Mona, Gleason, “Race, Class, Health: School Medical Inspection and ‘Healthy’ Children in British Columbia, 1890-1930,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 19, no. 1 (2002): 97.

[7]Ibid., 97.

 

[8] Ibid., 107.

[9] Ibid., 106.

[10] Ibid., 107.

[11] Cynthia, Comacchio, “’The Rising Generation’: Laying Claims to the Health of Adolescents in English Canada, 1920-70,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 19, no. 1 (2002): 142.

[12] Ibid., 142.

[13]Ibid., 145.

[14]Ibid., 154.