Gleason, Mona, “Race, Class, Health: School Medical Inspection and ‘Healthy’ Children in British Columbia, 1890-1930,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 19, 1 (2002): 95-112.

This article examines British Columbia’s attempt to control the spread of infectious disease, particularly in public schools. Even today, sickness spreads so quickly in schools, as it is a place where many children are in close proximity, and in many cases perhaps not following the most hygienic practices. I can only imagine how much worse this would have been when there were so many infectious diseases to potentially catch. It only makes sense that the government would develop an act to regulate the prevention of disease.

The assumption that non-white immigrants in British Columbia were less clean than white people fits in with our previous class readings. It is similar to Claudette Knight’s article “Black Parents Speak: Education in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Canada West,” in which the poor treatment of black students and the belief that they were somehow less clean than their white counterparts is discussed. It seems like this idea of the “other” and that they are inherently inferior to the “majority” is prevalent in Canadian history in a number of ways. It shows that the “healthy” student is the middle-class, white, Anglo-Saxon student, and there does not seem to be a lot of room for anyone that does not fit into this box.

Gleason also mentions that parents and teachers were expected to recognize the early symptoms of many deadly diseases, in order to keep these infected children away from school. She points out the fact that it would have been very difficult for the average person to recognize this symptoms, and this reminds me of Gerald Thomson’s article ““‘Through no fault of their own’: Josephine Dauphinee and the ‘Subnormal’ Pupils of the Vancouver School System, 1911-1941.” There were not necessarily qualified people making judgment calls about a child’s intellectual capabilities and therefore their ability to ever have children. It seems like both cases put a lot of weight onto non-professionals even though people’s lives were at stake. This seems to be one of the most important take-aways from all three articles of assigned reading this week.