When Canada was 150 years younger than it is now, birth, life, illness, and death were closer to the bone. Light and dark, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, repletion and hunger, had an immediacy we can now recover only distantly, from time to time, by an effort of imagination: after a cold day’s skating on a frozen lake, the keenness of the delight in a fire and a mug of tea. The margins for living then were broad, but the margins for life were narrow. A mistake with an axe, a small cut with a knife, a bad chill—for these the results could be desperate. Lord Sydenham, Governor General of Canada, was out riding at Kingston one fine September day in 1841; his horse stumbled and fell, and his right leg was badly crushed. He was dead in two weeks from lockjaw. In 1880 George Brown, owner-editor of the Toronto Globe, was shot by a disgruntled ex-employee. It was only a minor flesh wound, but gangrene set in; Brown was dead in seven weeks. Remarking in Parliament on the sudden, unexplained death of a colleague. Sir John A. Macdonald quoted Burke: “What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue.”
It was worse for women. Giving birth to children could be horrendous. When things did not go right, anything could happen. An eccentricity of the pelvis formation, the baby turned the wrong way, any one of a dozen unhappy possibilities could kill baby or mother or both. Every family had its private tragedies. Infant mortality was staggering. Between 1871 and 1883 John and Annie Thompson had nine children: four died in infancy and a fifth became a cripple from polio. The stories of the deaths of children that one finds in the novels of Gharles Dickens, mawkish as we now tend to think they are, reflect a reality few families could escape. Many popular songs concerned the deaths of children. The grim reaper’s scythe had legends inscribed on it: diphtheria, whooping-cough, measles, typhoid, smallpox.
But the nature of this tragic harvest was changing, or beginning to. Smallpox inoculation had been known for some time, but it was risky, and most people resisted it. By the 1800s Edward Jenner had made his great discovery—vaccination using the milder form of the disease, cowpox. Ether was first used in Boston in 1846, and it and chloroform were adopted as anaesthetics in Great Britain and British North America. Dr. Edward Dagge Worthington pioneered the use of anaesthetic at Sherbrooke, Canada East, in 1847. Queen Victoria’s son Leopold was born in 1853 with the help of chloroform. “That blessed chloroform,” was the Queen’s grateful reaction. She had some reason to know: it was her eighth child in thirteen years.
Victoria’s example made the use of anaesthetics more acceptable among her subjects.
But between inventions and their practical application, to say nothing of popular acceptance, there was often a considerable time lag, and this was particularly true in medicine. While the use of anaesthetic became common quickly, the prejudice against smallpox vaccination lasted a long time. Compulsory vaccination produced riots in Montreal in the 1870s. There was a major smallpox epidemic in Montreal and Ottawa in 1885. It did not end there: smallpox devastated Galt, Ontario, in 1902 and Windsor in 1924.
Against Asian cholera the available defences were fewer. The disease was fast and it was deadly. You could be dead twenty-four hours after you felt the first twinges. Cholera had come to Europe in 1831; colonial authorities knew about it ahead of time and established quarantine stations at Grosse He in the St. Lawrence below He d’Orleans, and also in Halifax and Saint John harbours. In 1832 cholera came through anyway, into Quebec Gity and Montreal, and the Maritime ports. It struck again in the early 1850s, and sporadic outbreaks continued into the 1880s. Still endemic in India, it was, and is, spread through contaminated drinking water. Gontrol and chlorination of drinking water was the answer, but it would take time for society to learn that, and more time to establish the public water systems that were essential to avoid contamination.
The doctors had to learn too. In British North America the attachment of medical schools to universities had begun early, with the formation of the McGill Medical School in 1829, and by the 1850s other medical schools had followed similar routes towards making medical education academic rather than merely a form of apprenticeship. It was at best an uneasy alliance; at Queen’s in Kingston and Dalhousie in Halifax there were always stresses and strains between the universities and their medical schools. Their functions were different, but in the end they learned that they depended upon each other.
Perhaps the most startling development following the adoption of ether and chloroform was the whole range of medical operations that had not been possible before. Early operations with ether were often successful, but the patient died of infection. It took time to recognize one essential in an operating room: sterile conditions. Even in the 1870s doctors would carry out operations without gloves and with barely washed hands, holding their scalpels in their teeth when their hands were busy with something else. Joseph Lister’s great discovery about antisepsis, that is, sterile conditions in surgery and the use of carbolic acid to disinfect wounds, was
McGill University was founded in 1821, with a legacy from Montreal’s great fur-trading merchant James McGill, and was thriving by 1875, when this picture appeared in the Canadian Illustrated News. Much of its success was due to the driving genius of John WiJliam Dawson, a Nova Scotia geologist who was principal from 1855 till 1893.
The University of Toronto began in 1827, when John Strachan—later Bishop of Toronto—secured a royal charter for King’s College, an Anglican university. In 1849 the college was secularized and renamed the University of Toronto. The architect W. G. Storm did this watercolour. Design for the University of Toronto.
A leading proponent of compulsory education was Methodist minister Egerton Ryerson, who became Canada West’s superintendent of education in 1844 and held that position for over thirty years. Oil (c. 1850-51) by Theophile Hamel.
Published in 1867. It took a decade to be accepted. By the 1890s operations were being performed successfully and safely.
Perhaps the most significant changes in Canada in the sixty years from 1840 to 1900 took place in medicine. Not least was the acceptance of women in hospitals, not only as nurses but as doctors. Emily Stowe, the first Canadian woman doctor, was refused admission to the Toronto School of Medicine in the 1860s. She studied medicine in New York and came back to practise in Toronto from 1867 to 1880 without a licence. Finally in 1880 she was allowed to qualify. In 1883 the Ontario Medical College for Women was opened, and finally the whole University of Toronto capitulated in 1886.
Medicine as seen in the newspapers was a very strange world. Every newspaper was filled with advertisements for marvellous medicines that were alleged to cure everything from the common cold to housemaid’s knee or pneumonia. And if there was any left over in the bottle, it wasn’t bad for horses either. For example, Radway’s Ready Relief transformed the patient from a state of “pain, misery, weakness and decrepitude, to the delightful enjoyment of health and strength,” and so swiftly was this effected that grateful patients ascribed it to enchantment. This was not a bad description; most patent medicines were 90 per cent alcohol.
Patent-medicine advertisements were notorious, but in other respects as well newspapers give a fascinating and doubtless misleading picture of nineteenth-century Canadian society. They could, and did, print almost anything they pleased. The reputation of the Toronto Globe was built on lively and often biased reporting; on its editorial page owner-editor George Brown enjoyed the freedom to pillory anyone he wanted to, usually his opposite numbers in politics. The public tolerated, indeed expected, newspapers to support friends and abuse opponents. They were like the cartoons of the present day; even when you know they exaggerate you are amused. And the laws of libel were light and easy. Newspapers in Victorian Canada were certainly not stuffy. Robbery, riot, murder, hangings, wrecks (by sea and land), war (European and North American), scandal, and vengeance were all there. A ball at Charlottetown in 1864 was described in terms that resemble the excesses of the Roman Empire:
Pleasure panoplied in lustful smiles meets and embraces exuberant foy... the fascinating dance goes merrily, and the libidinous waltz with its lascivious entwinements whiles in growing excitement; the swelling bosom and the voluptuous eye tell the story of intemperate revel____
One Saint John newspaper commented on that delicious run of hyperbole, “There are some desperate fellows in the Prince Edward Island press.”
Newspapers thrived on politics, and politicians needed newspapers. Newspapers had their principles, but newspapers, and principles, could be bought and sold. Sometimes they did not even need to be sold. They had occasionally to stand some stiff changes, in men and tactics. In 1854 John A. Macdonald wanted the Hamilton Spectator to support him through a sharp change of policy. It was, frankly, an outrageous demand, since it meant the Spectator would have to support a local politician it had denounced for years. “It’s a damned sharp curve,” the editor wrote back to Macdonald, but, he added loyally, “I think we can take it.” Newspapers would have greater changes than that to urge, to oppose, or just to take, in the movement for Confederation that lay ahead.
World History
