Social investment in medical forms: The 1866 cholera scare and beyond

Canadian Historical Review

Volumn 81, Issue 3, 2000, Pages 347-379

  Curtis, Bruce ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; CANADA; CHOLERA; CLASSIFICATION; EDUCATION; EPIDEMIC; GOVERNMENT; HEALTH EDUCATION; HISTORY; ORGANIZATION; PUBLIC HEALTH; STATISTICS; UTILIZATION REVIEW;

CANADA; CHOLERA; CONGRESSES; DISEASE OUTBREAKS; GOVERNMENT; HEALTH EDUCATION; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; PUBLIC HEALTH;

EID: 10244275140     PISSN: 00083755     EISSN: 17101093     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3138/CHR.81.3.347     Document Type: Review

References (111)

1. David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press 1993);
2. Geoffrey Bilson, A Darkened House: Cholera in Nineteenth-Century Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1980);
3. François Delaporte, Disease and Civilization: The Cholera in Paris, 1832 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1986);
4. Richard J. Evans, Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years, 1830-1910 (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1987);
5. C.M. Godfrey, The Cholera Epidemics in Upper Canada, 1832-1866 (Toronto: Seccombe House 1968);
6. Anne Hardy, 'Cholera, Quarantine and the English Preventive System, 1850-1895,' Medical History 37 (1993): 250-69;
7. Catherine J. Kudlick, Cholera in Post-Revolutionary Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press 1996);
8. W. Luckin, 'The Final Catastrophe: Cholera in London, 1866,' Medical History 21 (1977): 32-42;
9. V. Prashad, 'Native Dirt/Imperial Ordure: The Cholera of 1832 and the Morbid Resolutions of Modernity,' Journal of Historical Sociology 7 (1994): 243-60;
10. Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1962);
11. Walter Sendzik, 'The 1832 Cholera Epidemic: A Study in State Formation' (MA thesis, McGill University 1998)
12. It is impossible to say with any certainty how many, if any, deaths from cholera took place in 1866, although one authoritative source has claimed that 'North America was not spared' from the disease in that year; see Kenneth F. Kiple, ed., The Cambridge World History of Human Disease (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993), 527-8.
13. Death and illness in Canada were not invested in stable medical/statistical forms until after 1921, and 1866 was not a census year, so even the dubious death-reporting practices of enumerators are unavailable; see Jacalyn Duffin, 'Census versus Medical Daybooks: A Comparison of Two Sources on Mortality in Nineteenth-Century Ontario,' Continuity and Change 12, 2 (1997): 199-219;
14. George Emery, Facts of Life: The Social Construction of Vital Statistics in Ontario, 1869-1952 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press 1993). There were certainly reports of cholera on the England, but the contemporary press also claimed that, despite the holding of the passengers on board ship in quarantine, the disease had disappeared in a few days;
15. see, for instance, Le Pays, 17 and 21 April 1866.
16. See Heather MacDougall, 'Public Health and the "Sanitary Idea" in Toronto, 1866-1890,' in W. Mitchinson and J. McGinnis, eds., Essays in the History of Canadian Medicine (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1988), 62-87;
17. City of Toronto, By-Law 431, Relative to the Board of Health: Practical Remarks to Citizens, Domestic Sanitary Regulations and Treatment of Cholera (Toronto: Leader Press 1866).
18. See, for instance, the report in Le Pays, 19 April 1866.
19. Delaporte, Disease and Civilization;
20. Kudlick, Cholera in Post-Revolutionary Paris
21. Mary Poovey, 'Curing the "Social Body" in 1832: James Phillips Kay and the Irish in Manchester,' Gender and History 5, 2 (1993): 196-211;
22. and Making a Social Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1995);
23. also, T.S. Ashton, Economic and Social Investigations in Manchester, 1833-1933: A Centenary History of the Manchester Statistical Society (1934; Brighton: Harvester Press 1977);
24. R.J.W. Selleck, James Kay-Shuttleworth: Journey of an Outsider (Essex: Woburn Press 1994).
25. Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844; New York: International 1974), draws heavily on Kay.
26. John Snow, On the Mode of Communication of Cholera, 2nd ed. (London: John Churchill 1855)
27. See John M. Eyler, Victorian Social Medicine: The Ideas and Methods of William Farr (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1979);
28. Samuel Finer, The Life and Times of Sir Edwin Chadwick (1952; New York: Barnes and Noble 1970);
29. Margaret Pelling, Cholera, Fever and English Medicine, 1825-1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1978);
30. F.B. Smith, Florence Nightingale: Reputation and Power (London: Croom Helm 1982).
31. Perry Williams, 'The Laws of Health: Women, Medicine and Sanitary Reform, 1850-1890,' in Marina Benjamin, ed., Science and Sensibility: Gender and Scientific Enquiry 1780-1945 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1991), 60-88
32. Cholera is thus an interesting site for Foucauldian-inspired investigations of 'governmentality.' See G. Burchell et al., eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1993).
33. The isolation of the agent would later be attributed to Filippo Pacini in 1854. Evans, Death in Hamburg, 264-280, shows that Koch had the political backing needed to sustain a bacteriological interpretation.
34. See, for example, Michel Callon, 'Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay,' in John Law, ed., Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1988), 197-233;
35. Michel Callon and John Law, 'On Interests and Their Transformation: Enrolment and Counter-Enrolment,' Social Studies of Science 12 (1982): 615-25,
36. and 'On the Construction of Sociotechnical Networks: Content and Context Revisited,' Knowledge and Society 8 (1989): 57-83;
37. and Laurent Thévenot, 'Rules and Implements: Investment in Forms,' Social Science Information 23, 1 (1984): 1-45.
38. For more on Taché's biography, see Jean-Guy Nadeau, 'Joseph-Charles Taché,' Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol.12 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1990), 1012-16;
39. Evelyn Bossé, Joseph-Charles Taché: Un grand représantant de l'élite canadienne-française (Québec: Éditions Garneau 1971).
40. For an examination of Taché's Memorandum as a fundamentalist Catholic propaganda sheet, see B. Curtis, 'La moralité miasmatique: le Mémoire sur le Choléra de Joseph-Charles Taché,' paper presented to the Canadian History of Medicine Association, Sherbrooke, 1999.
41. See Canada Gazette, 9 June 1849. The first General Board of Health was composed of doctors and other men of substance - Wolfred Nelson, Olivier Berthelet, William Workman, John James Day, Moses J. Hayes, Guillaume Deschambault, and Robert Levy MacDonnell - with Doctor Aaron H. David as secretary. MacDonnell sought his pay in a petition of 21 June 1850. See Legislative Assembly of Canada, Journals.
42. National Archives of Canada (NA), RG 17, 4, MacDonnell to McGee, 1 April 1865; RG 17, AI 2, Taché to MacDonnell, 4 April 1865
43. NA RG 7, G1 157, Newcastle to Monck, 6 April 1864. According to the survey, 'the Canadian institutions are the only ones which are subjected to a special body of general inspectors properly qualified and devoted to their business.' At the time, Taché was chair of the Board of Prison and Asylum Inspectors, which inspected the quarantine station and the Marine and Emigrant Hospital. NA, RG 17, 4, Buchanan to Taché, 21 April 1865
44. NA, RG17, 5, Buchanan to Taché, 18, 19 July 1865. The sailors claimed to have been innoculated. Von Iffland treated them with 'the celebrated herb sent to me on last Saturday by a Mr Lindsay Lighthouse Keeper of "Isle Verte" and it seems to have acted to all appearance with good effect ... It is called "Sabots de la Vierge."; NA, RG 17, 6, Lindsay to Taché, 26 July and 1 Aug. 1865, Von Iffland to Taché, 24 Aug. 1865; and Roy to McGee, 21 Sept. 1865
45. NA, RG 17, 6, Von Iffland to Taché, 15 Nov. (with 19 Oct.) 1865. For more on Von Iffland, aptly called by his patients 'va renifler,' since he was a committed sanitarian and an odd choice for the management of contagion, see M.-J. Ahern and Georges Ahern, Useful Notes on the History of Medicine in Lower Canada from the Founding of Quebec to the Beginning of the 19th Century (Quebec: Privately published 1923), 555-7;
46. and Jacques Bernier, La médecine au Québec. Naissance et évolution d 'une profession (Québec: Les Presses de l'université Laval 1989), passim
47. 'The Cholera,' Kingston British Whig, 6 Feb. 1866
48. For Toronto, see Hamilton Spectator, 12 Feb. 1866;
49. for the quotation, see Hamilton Spectator, ibid., 26 Feb. 1866;
50. for more on events in Toronto, including the meeting mentioned, see MacDougall, 'Public Health,' 67.
51. Spectator, 16 March 1866. The editor hoped the installation of the government at Ottawa would incite it to take sanitary measures.
52. British Whig, 17 Feb. 1866
53. Le Pays , 1 Feb. 1866
54. Le Pays , Ibid., 6 Feb. 1866
55. Le Pays , Ibid., 22 Feb. 1866
56. Le Pays , Ibid., 1, 6, 15 March 1866
57. Le Pays , Ibid., 24, 29 March, 7 April 1866
58. NA, RG 17, 9, petition of S. Abbott, 7 March 1866; James Wilson to McDougall, 17 March 1866; RG 17, AI 2, Taché to City Clerk, London, 13 March 1866; Taché to W.W.F. Tinsdale, Ancaster, 28 March 1866
59. NA, RG 1, E7 66, and RG 17, 8, 20 Feb. 1866; RG 17, AI 1, Taché to J.G. Moylan, Canadian Freeman, 28 Feb. 1866
60. NA, RG 17, AI 2, for the invitations, Taché to doctors, 8 March 1866; for the lime, RG 1, E7 66, 10 March 1866
61. British Whig, 21 and 30 March 1866;
62. Memorandum on Cholera, Adopted at a Medical Conference Held in the Bureau of Agriculture, in March, 1866 (Ottawa: Bureau of Agriculture and Statistics 1866)
63. See Curtis, 'La moralité miasmatique,'
64. and, for Marsden, Bernier, La médecine au Québec, passim.
65. Note that Marsden, with an international reputation as a quarantine expert, was invited repeatedly to consult with the American government about such measures, but not the Canadian. See, for instance, British Whig, 5 March 1866. Marsden seems not to have figured in any of Taché's arrangements.
66. See Luckin, 'The Final Catastrophe.'
67. Thévenot, 'Rules and implements'; as the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has it, to invest means to '1 ... Clothe ... endue (person etc. with qualities, insignia of office, rank etc.) 2. Lay siege to. 3. Employ ... esp. for profit.'
68. Pierre Bourdieu, 'Codification,' in In Other Words: Essays towards a Reflexive Sociology (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1990), 83.
69. See also M.E. Hobart and Z.S. Schiffman, Information Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1988), 11-31.
70. Space considerations preclude a more systematic examination of the implications of the politics of representation involved in forming social relations in these ways. Note the argument of Law and Whittaker that suppression of empirical variation and the simplification of objects and relations is necessary if 'heterogeneous objects distributed through time and space are to be brought together in a conformable space at a particular time.' John Law and John Whittaker, 'On the Art of Representation: Notes on the Politics of Visualisation,' in Gordon Fyfe and John Law, eds., Picturing Power: Visual Depiction and Social Relations, Sociological Review Monograph 35 (London: Routledge 1988), 160-183
71. The questions are given in NA, RG17, 9, 9 April 1866, reprinted with the regulations in the Canada Gazette, April 1866, 1295-1298
72. NA, RG 17, AI 2, Memorandum on Public Health and Quarantine, 1866. The regulations in draft are in RG 1, E7 66, 9 April 1866, and here McGee seeks permission not only to declare them but to be allowed to suspend them from time to time as circumstances might require.
73. NA, RG 17, 10, Théodore Robitaille, 4 May 1866; RG 17, 11, J.D. Short, 31 May 1866; Canada Gazette, 8 May 1866
74. NA, RG 17, AI 2, Taché to Allan Brothers, 13 April 1866
75. NA, RG 17, 9, Hugh Allan, 14 April 1866; RG 17, 10, Dixon to Taché, 3 May 1866; Allan Brothers, 4 May 1866; Allan & Gilmour Co., 8 May 1866
76. NA, RG 17, 11, A.C. Buchanan, 21 June 1866
77. NA, RG 17, 11, Allan Brothers, 31 July 1866; RG 17, AI 2, Taché to Allan Brothers, 3 Aug. 1866. 'The Customs officers have been instructed by the Minister of Finance to look after the prospect of the Cholera threatening any part of our Frontier and to Telegraph to the Minister of Agriculture any occurrence which may call for action.'
78. NA, RG 17, 9, Von Iffland to McGee, 17 April 1866; RG 17 10, Von Iffland to Taché, 2 May 1866; Buchanan to Taché, 7 and 12 May 1866. RG 17, AI 2, 1866, for grant for missionaries. For Montizambert's qualifications, see RG 17, 15, 9 March 1867; he had two years' training at Laval before going to Edinburgh, where he was dresser and non-resident clerk for James Syme.
79. NA, RG 17, 10, Buchanan to Taché, Von Iffland to Taché, 17 May 1866
80. NA, RG 17, 10, Von Iffland, weekly reports, 23 May, 13 June 1866; for the Board of Health, see RG 17, 2432.
81. For complaints about contact, see NA, RG 17, 10, W. Warden, 31 May 1866; RG 17, AI 2, Taché to Von Iffland, 2 June 1866; RG 17, 10, Buchanan to Taché, enclosing Von Iffland to Buchanan, 6 June 1866, where it is noted for Taché's information that the contractor provisioning the island was approved initially by Taché's uncle Étienne-Pascal; RG 17, 11, see the weekly reports from 13 June until the station closed in the first week in November; for the death of his infirmier, 18 July 1866.
82. NA, RG 17, 14, Buchanan to Chapais, enclosing Von Iffland to Buchanan, 7 March 1867; Province of Canada, Legislative Assembly, Sessional Papers, 1867, no. 3, 'Nine and Twentieth Annual Report of the Chief Agent for Immigration, 1866.' Not including the $3200 expense of the boarding physicians, the costs for the Grosse Isle station for the year were as follows: Pay of officers' wintering party $10,221.37 Hospital charges 1,085.26 Cartage 677.25 Medicines 114.31 Furniture, stoves, &c 836.11 Steamboat service, weekly 2,535.19 Repairs, &c, 1,919.99 Sundries 166.80 Printing, stationery, advertising 589.79 Total $18,146.07
83. Province of Canada, Legislative Assembly, Sessional Papers, 1867, no. 3
84. There seems to be little attention to public health in the Canadian state-formation literature. It is not a theme, for instance, in Allan Greer and Ian Radforth, eds., Colonial Leviathan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1992).
85. On inspection and the centralization of knowledge, see B. Curtis, True Government by Choice Men? Inspection, Education and State Formation in Canada West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1992).
86. On the work of domain formation and state formation, see Jacques Donzelot, L'invention du social (Paris: Fayard 1984);
87. B. Curtis, 'Working Past the Great Abstraction: Abrams and Foucault on the State and Government,' Les Cahiers d'histoire 17 (1997): 9-18,
88. and 'Mapping the Social: Jacob Keefer's Educational Tour, 1845,' Journal of Canadian Studies 28, 2 (1993): 51-68.
89. The standard work on state formation and moral regulation is Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1985);
90. see also Prashad, 'Native Dirt/Imperial Ordure.'
91. For the 'governmental state,' see Michel Foucault, 'La «gouvernementalité»,' and 'Méthodologie pour la connaissance du monde: comment se débarrasser du marxisme,' in Dits et écrits, vol.3 (Paris: Gallimard 1996), 635-57 and 595-618,
92. and 'Technologies of the Self,' in L.H. Martin et al., eds., Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press 1988), 16-19.
93. Thomas Osborne, 'Security and Vitality: Drains, Liberalism and Power in the Nineteenth Century,' in Andrew Barry et al., eds., Foucault and Political Reason (London: UCL Press 1996), 99-123,
94. presents a 'governmentality' take on public health; see also Mariana Valverde, Diseases of the Will: Alcohol and the Dilemmas of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1999).
95. See R.D. Gidney and W.P.J. Millar, Professional Gentlemen: The Professions in Nineteenth-Century Ontario, Ontario Historical Studies Series (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1994).
96. NA, RG 17, 1663, J. Dickson, 20 April, J. Beatty, 26 April 1866
97. The regulations are reprinted widely in various official sources and in the press of the period; see, for instance, Canada Gazette, May 1866, 1738-1740
98. See Thévenot, 'Rules and Implements.'
99. Hamilton Spectator, 2 May 1866;
100. British Whig, 3 May 1866. In the British Whig of 5 May, G.S. Hobart of the Kingston Medical Hall was advertising supplies of the remedy for sale
101. See also Arnold, Colonizing the Body, for the attempts by the British Army in India to deal with cholera.
102. NA, RG 17, AI 2, Taché to municipal officials, 12 April 1866; Taché to medical doctors, 9 May 1866
103. NA, RG 17, 2432, for the Board's correspondence and activities
104. Province of Canada, Legislative Assembly, Sessional Papers, 1867, no. 3, 'Report of the Central Board of Health'
105. NA, RG 17, AI 2, Cambie to Buchanan, 27 March 1867
106. NA, RG 17, 14, Carnarvon to Governor General, 26 Jan. 1867; RG 17, 15, Meredith to minister of agriculture, 27 March 1867
107. The argument is strongly opposed to John S. Hagopian's position in 'Debunking the Public Health Myth: Municipal Politics and Class Conflict during the Galt, Ontario, Waterworks Campaigns, 1888-1890,' Labour/Le Travail 39 (spring 1997): 39-68, where public health concerns are held to have had no importance in campaigns for municipal infrastructure.
108. See, for example, Costley's autograph draft plan for a national statistical system in NA, RG 17, 51, Costley to Dunkin, 4 Sept. 1871
109. For the 1872 controversy, see B. Curtis, 'Expert Knowledge and the Social Imaginary: The Case of the Montreal Check Census,' Histoire sociale/Social History 28 (Nov. 1995): 313-38.
110. See Le Pays, 19 April 1866; 4, 6 April 1867; and especially for Carpenter, 20 Jan. 1870.
111. NA, MG 29, E18 3, Lowe to Carpenter, 24 July, 25 Aug. 1871. Lowe's son Johnny was apparently living with the Carpenters. For the schedules, see MG 29 E 18, 7, 1871-1872