by Greg Di Cresce
Winnipeg, Manitoba
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The Winnipeg Children’s Hospital first appeared in a booming, ambitious and optimistic prairie metropolis in the early twentieth century. It took its shape in the city’s north end against a backdrop of explosive immigration, ferociously paced urban and industrial growth and a remarkably active and reform-minded British-Canadian middle class. While responding to such factors, the Children’s Hospital also found its evolving form in the dynamic scientific developments of medicine and the steady push for greater professionalization among health care workers.
From 1909 to 1925, the Winnipeg Children’s Hospital appears to have followed the general two-step narrative associated with most voluntary hospitals in Canada. The first step, from 1890 to 1920, involved reformers and professionals working to convince the broader public to transfer the care of the sick from home to hospital. Prior to this shift, the hospital was largely regarded as “a charnel house for the sick poor.” [1] They were considered places of last resort. The second step, from 1920 to 1950, saw health professionals attempting to turn hospitals into healing institutions for all members of the community, and a gradual failure to achieve this goal. A significant reason for this failure involved a greater commercialization and industrialization of heath as it was increasingly commoditized. Charitable hospitals slowly turned into health factories that not everyone could afford.
Winnipeg’ second Children’s Hospital, built on Aberdeen Avenue in 1911, is seen in this photograph from circa 1947.
Source: https://picasaweb.google.com/wchcentennial
While following these broad contours of development, the Children’s Hospital was also a complex social site of cooperation, compromise and contest: processes highly gendered as well as shaped by class, ethnicity and race. Distinct attitudes regarding Empire and its relation to reform further complicated the picture. Many reform-minded actors, from businessmen and politicians to club and professional women, carried the ideological baggage of Canadian imperialism and settler colonialism with them from England and eastern Canada to Winnipeg, and quickly put them to work in the community—even before the city experienced its surge in urban-industrial development at the turn of the century. They viewed the city as both “an industrial and a colonial centre” [2] and this imbued Winnipeg’s reform movement and its response to social ills of the modern metropolis with a distinctive inflection.
In the case of the Children’s Hospital, this inflection expressed itself most notably in a maternal feminist influence on the institution’s daily management and organization. Even as maternal feminism’s reach shrank with the gradual emergence of female professionalism, the maternal model continued to influence hospital policy. This persistence speaks to a potent understanding of family, a patriarchal logic that lay at the core of the imperial project. It was a vision that idealized and naturalized a two-sphere approach. It fixed women and children in a domestic bubble and placed men in the public realm of politics and economics. Such attitudes when applied to the Winnipeg Children’s Hospital tended to “naturally” transform the doctor-nurse-patient relationship into a kind of familial relationship, especially because the patient being cared for was a child. Also important to this project was the perceived superiority not only of British practices, ideas and beliefs, but also of the British race vis-à-vis immigrants from other parts of the globe. Together these notions informed the design, management and location of the hospital in its early years.
When the hospital opened in the winter of 1909 on Beaconsfield Street in the north end of the city, Winnipeg was booming. From 1901 to 1913, Winnipeg gained more than 100,000 people as it grew from a modest city of 42,000 to a cosmopolitan metropolis of 150,000. [3] It was now the third largest city in the Dominion behind only Toronto and Montreal. Passing through this gateway city to the “Last Best West” were hundreds of thousands of immigrants, many from central and eastern Europe and Britain. Their presence added to the city’s rush and roar as well as to the wealth of a vast local outfitting industry, which included a network of financial institutions, legal firms and wholesalers. Going in the other direction through Winnipeg to the rest of Canada and the world was more grain annually than the city of Chicago handled. Winnipeg’s Grain Exchange emerged as a major international centre for the pricing and sale of grain. On the other side of the Red River in St. Boniface sat the largest stockyard in the British Empire and a flourishing meat-processing industry. Moving all this traffic and freight were the trains of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, National Transcontinental Railway, Canadian Northern Railway and Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR). Each railway operated significant sheds, repair shops and administrative offices in the city. Near the tracks were numerous employment agencies looking to pair a large floating population of seasonal workers with jobs harvesting or in the resource sector, such as mining or lumber. The tracks also attracted much of the city’s industrial and manufacturing sector.
With so much work to be had around the central rail yards, perhaps it is not surprising, that homes for workers would be built nearby. Many of these homes were built on small lots north of the massive CPR yards. Here lived many of Winnipeg’s working poor and most of its non-British immigrants. This bustling and energetic community was physically separated from the rest of the city by the central railway tracks. By 1913, most of Winnipeg’s Jewish, Slavic and Scandinavian populations, as well as approximately one-quarter of its German residents, made their homes and their neighbourhoods here in what quickly became named by the British-Canadian majority “the foreign quarter.” [4] Such social and spatial segregation all but ensured that “the image of the north end held by those living in the rest of the city was rarely disturbed by reality.” [5]
So what did those living outside the north end imagine it to be? Certainly many different meanings were inscribed upon this terra incognita. [6] According to urban historian Alan Artibise, the north end seemed to represent an ambivalent urban space of hope and fear for the city’s charter class, those aspiring British Canadians running the city. [7] On the one hand, the north end contained the people power driving the rapid economic growth of Winnipeg from which this class derived its wealth and much of its optimism. On the other hand, this class saw the “foreignness” of those north of the tracks as a distraction or impediment to the shining future it believed was the destiny of Winnipeg and Canada. This view of non-British immigrants was affirmed in the Winnipeg Telegram in 1901:
There are few people who will affirm that Slavonic immigrants are desirable settlers, or that they are welcomed by the white people of Western Canada. … Those whose ignorance is impenetrable, whose customs are repulsive, whose civilization is primitive, and whose character and morals are justly condemned, are surely not the class of immigrants, which the country’s paid immigration agents should seek to attract. Better by far to keep our land for the children, and the children’s children, of Canadians, than to fill up the country with the scum of Europe. [8]
Historian Kurt Korneski suggests that this charter class would have viewed the north end through a lens that melded its class conceits with a staunch imperialist perspective. Korneski situates Winnipeg within the sweep of European, and in particular British, imperial history. He argues that those members of the charter class, such as businessmen James Ashdown and A. G. B. Bannatyne, lawyer and eventual attorney general Colin H. Campbell and his wife Minnie J. B. Campbell, authors and suffragists like Lillian and Francis Beynon, E. Cora Hind and Nellie McClung, ministers like Charles Gordon and J. S. Woodsworth, and politicians like Thomas Mayne Daly, came armed with the ideas, practices and an affection for the institutions of imperialism. They also came at a time when Britain was endorsing Canada’s annexation of the Northwest, and the new Canadian nation-state was promoting the displacement of Aboriginal peoples through white settlement. Settler colonialists placed themselves “among the finest examples of the ‘British race.’” [9]
The benefits of fresh air. Nurses and children on a balcony at the Aberdeen location of the Children’s Hospital, no date.
Source: https://picasaweb.google.com/wchcentennial
Although a far from monolithic group, these early British and British-Canadian bourgeois-minded settlers took seriously their task of spreading the gospel of Empire and reform. Contradictions in nineteenth-century industrial capitalism raised awareness that old liberalism’s Lockean notions of a minimal state put too much strain on society. These tensions potentially led to a dangerous solidarity among the working class. A liberalism of developmental democracy sought to address these failures and it is largely from this emerging new liberalism that the reform movement took its direction. These new liberals
began to voice theories, to direct government money, and to build government agencies that reflected the belief that the state’s legitimacy lay in the fact that it ostensibly increased the “amount of personal self-development of all members of the society” by nurturing men and women so as to provide conditions and instil individuals with characteristics needed for success. [10]
Depicted as historical agents bridging the old radical individual liberalism and the new developmental liberalism were also reformers, such as the Alloways, who built privately funded and voluntary agencies. They helped prepare their society for the further social elevation of the professional, and in the process, they also reproduced what Ian McKay has referred to as the liberal order. [11]
Even before the city had a railway connection, Winnipeg reformers had created a network of clubs, societies and schools designed to project and create a sense of civilization, to burnish their own badges of civility, to illustrate a model of morality, and to provide themselves with a stage upon which to perform and express a sense of “Britishness” or an idealized version of the English bourgeois life. [12] By the 1890s, as aboriginals “vanished” from the city and trains arrived, reformers began to view the seemingly endless land around them as “empty space.” This was space devoid of humanity, history and tradition, presenting a blank slate on which they could create not merely a “little Britain” but a “better Britain.” [13]
It is this conception of colonial space, conveniently forgetting the act of indigenous dispossession, which can shed light on what reformers saw when they gazed upon the north end in the early twentieth century. As part of a setting uncontaminated by tradition, the north end shared in this vision of liberating “emptiness” where “abundant resources and bracing climate … would ‘breed and maintain the most virile community of Anglo-Saxons in the world.’” [14] On top of this was a teleological view of human history which suggested that the extent to which those living in the north end failed to be fully human was directly proportional to the degree they deviated from an idealized middle-class British-Canadian way of life.
Such an outlook also helped to explain how reformers, at least prior to the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike, avoided framing the north end in terms of class. By emphasizing both the virtually unlimited potential and superabundance of “empty space,” reformers could maintain that the methods of production in the Canadian west did not rely on class inequality, as might be the case elsewhere. Here, at least, there was “nothing inherently inequitable about a liberal capitalist society.” [15] This meant the “social ills” suffered by those in the north end were not a product of low wages and poor living conditions, but a result of their “race” being lower on the social evolutionary ladder. If one rereads the Winnipeg Telegram on the lack of desirability of Slavonic settlers, it should be apparent how thoroughly hegemonic the explanatory power of these attitudes had become. Of course, these attitudes expressed themselves in a range of responses from angry “racist” and nativist to more hopeful assimilationist. There was a sense among many of the city’s elite, given the “success” of their race and the possibilities of “emptiness,” that they had been burdened with a great responsibility. They were obliged to help uplift the deserving “sufferers” in their midst, those who were ignorant, and morally and spiritually inferior. “It was the duty of ‘advanced’ peoples the world over to bring the ‘lesser races’ up to the level of the British, thereby moving humanity as a whole toward a more happy, affluent, socially peaceful existence.” [16]
Patients in the Children’s Ward of the Winnipeg General Hospital, circa 1911.
Source: University of Manitoba, Faculty of Medicine Archives, MPC 4.1.56.
The health of the city’s poor and immigrant population was a major focus of reform initiatives. On the auspicious opening day of the Children’s Hospital in 1909, Winnipeg Mayor W. Sanford Evans addressed a crowd of two hundred people, many likely among the city’s most prominent reformers. Evans, co-founder of the Canadian Club movement and former publisher of the Telegram, began by congratulating “the women of Winnipeg” and celebrated what he called a “new movement, which was destined to do such good work.” T. Mayne Daly followed Evans to the podium. Daly, chair of the hospital’s all-male advisory board, a former federal Conservative cabinet minister, and only recently appointed first judge of Manitoba’s juvenile court, reiterated the notion that the hospital existed due to the women of Winnipeg. The unnamed writer of the Manitoba Free Press article announcing the hospital’s opening added that it was “essentially a women’s work.” After the men, Annie Bond reluctantly spoke, according to the newspaper account. Bond, “chairman” of the hospital’s board of directors, a former nurse trained at a Nightingale school in England and decorated for her time nursing in the Royal Army Medical Corps, modestly refrained from discussing her efforts to bring a children’s hospital to Winnipeg. She instead thanked all those who worked with her to make it a reality. [17]
Like the first iterations of many other children’s hospitals in North America, the Winnipeg Children’s Hospital was a renovated rented home in a poor area perceived to be rife with social ills. While the reasons why Winnipeg needed a separate hospital for children went largely undocumented—there was already a children’s ward at Winnipeg’s General Hospital—advocates for special children’s facilities elsewhere argued that the environment in general hospitals “corrupted” children and it was “wrong to expose children to moral contamination to obtain rather uncertain medical results.” [18] In the matter of infant and child health in the north end, perhaps the embarrassing facts did all the talking. Winnipeg consistently recorded some of the highest infant mortality and general death rates on the continent. The north end, while not the only area where infant mortality was high, was the epicentre of these deaths. In 1905, the city health officer counted 513 infant deaths. That meant one in eight babies did not live for more than twelve months. “The response of the elite to this situation was to blame poor sanitary conditions on the ignorance, laziness and immorality of the North End’s foreign born population.” [19]
The first patient admitted to the Children’s Hospital, as described by a Free Press reporter, reinforced this perspective.
The first patient, a tiny Russian infant, was carried in its mother’s arms to the institution Friday evening. The child came from a home in the foreign quarter of Winnipeg. Its father was out of employment, and the family was destitute, living in filthy and unsanitary quarters. [20]
In the eyes of reformers, here was the model “little sufferer.” Here was evidence that “Old World mothers did not have the training necessary to raise children adapted to urban, industrial society.” [21] Here was also some of the culturally coded “language of Missions and purity work” that historian Mariana Valverde has argued reflected and helped reproduce “pre-existing power relations.” It was a language steeped in patriarchal logic, class bias and notions of race to create and reproduce a web of authority. [22]
This discourse and more was on display in the hospital’s first annual report. Anxiety over the perceived ignorance of “foreign” parents and how it obstructed the hospital from doing its “good work” permeated the inaugural report. A persistent assault on the foreign family was reflected in the tone of the report and the way the middle-class British-Canadian board members interpreted the hospital’s mortality and morbidity data. For example, of the 228 patients admitted in 1909, 42 improved, seven showed no improvement, 47 died, 13 were removed by their parents against staff’s wishes, five were discharged with contagious disease, and 13 remained. The report categorized the patients by sex and ethnicity. The hospital saw 121 males and 102 females and of that total, there were 102 British-born, 121 of “foreign extraction,” mostly “Poles and Hebrews,” and five of unknown nationality. Although they treated almost as many “British” patients, the all-female board concluded from these figures that immigrant parents were too lazy, ignorant or unwilling to bring their children to this modern reform institution in time to be “saved.” As the report put it: “[The high infant mortality rate resulted from a] great number of babies brought to the hospital in a moribund condition during the summer months suffering from ‘Infantile Cholera’ [and] … these patients came from homes of foreigners uninformed re Hospital advantages, therefore leaving it (so often) too late for treatment to be of any avail … “ [23] Those parents who withdrew their children only reinforced the board’s opinion of their ignorance.
Despite the equivocal success of the Hospital’s first year, the experience was a positive opportunity from the perspective of many of those providing the volunteer care. It permitted this class and “race” of women to express and reinforce some maternal feminist goals—to perform women’s work outside the strict confines of their own homes—and gave them a venue to express the core traditions of their “British spirit,” including self-sacrifice, perseverance and devotion. [24]
The great joy and satisfaction that is experienced by all those who are helping to carry out this work is sufficient reward for all their efforts and self-sacrifices. The little sufferers relieved, the lives saved to grow up as useful men and women, and the lifting of the burden from many an over-taxed parent will only be made known at the great day of reckoning. [25]
Tucked into this quotation too was a clear recognition of the relationship between the family and industry. Board members viewed the healing and uplift of immigrant families as a way to protect and reproduce the liberal order, [26] hence, the point about saving lives “to grow up as useful men and women.” And while the medico-scientific value of the hospital and the efforts of the volunteer physicians were acknowledged, it was the institution’s social mission, managed daily by women, that garnered most of the attention.
The architecture of the Beaconsfield Street hospital further played to the notion that this was a women’s enterprise. The hospital was once the home of Manitoba’s Lieutenant Governor Sir John and Lady Schultz. Later, when the new hospital was built on Aberdeen Avenue in 1911, the Duke of Connaught (Canada’s Governor General and Queen Victoria’s son) and his daughter Princess Patricia would attend its formal opening. The Free Press described the Beaconsfield hospital in idyllic terms (i.e., as an ideal middle-class British-Canadian home): a three-storey home with an airy and sunny interior and a child-friendly two-acre lot next to the Red River. The emphasis on sun and air neatly meshed with socio-medical miasmatic theory, which called for cleanliness and fresh air to dispel any bad air (an atmosphere of decomposing material) thought to cause illness. The miasmatic theory put a premium on sanitary conditions, something Bond’s Nightingale training emphasized, and was consistent with the notion that a hospital was somehow a domestic space, too. [27] This blurring of conceptions of space permitted the maternal language of domesticity (housekeeping, nursing the sick, raising the young) to shape the hospital. Further, the idealized nature of the middle-class home-turned-hospital on Beaconsfield was used to impress upon patients, and particularly their parents, the superiority of the reformers’ way of life. The surroundings were an intentional contrast to the “homes of wretchedness and sin” in which many of the middle-class women assumed their patients were raised. [28] Lastly, having a hospital begin in a home may have helped to ease some of the fears of parents entrusting the facility with the care of their children, and helped in the transition from home to hospital. [29]
“My kiddies”. Winnipeg General Hospital nurse E. E. Reid annotated this photo “Some of my kiddies in the Children’s Ward when I was in charge, 1911 or 1912.”
Source: University of Manitoba, Faculty of Medicine Archives, MPC 4.1.56.B.
While the relocation of the Children’s Hospital from Beaconsfield to a new building on Aberdeen Avenue signalled a significant shift from the social to a more scientific approach to hospital care, with more modern facilities and professional staff, it did not mean an immediate abandonment of the hospital’s social mission. Perhaps the most tangible evidence of this was that it remained in the north end. Those who led the building fund campaign, such as wholesale baron and former mayor J. H. Ashdown and prominent lawyer A. J. Andrews, played a particularly important role in the decision to stay in the area. [30] Annmarie Adams and David Theodore, who have analyzed the changing architectural designs of children’s hospitals, note that during the interwar years
conservative, historicist interiors were used to comfort patients and visitors, please patrons, and solidify the social status of the institution. There was a self-conscious use of architectural forms to perpetuate and symbolize traditional spatial and social orders, perhaps as a defence against the fears about urbanization and industrialization.” [31]
For example, the building on Aberdeen had open-air balconies for convalescent care on the first two floors of the east wing. They echoed the verandahs and balconies that were typically built on middle-class homes of this period. [32]
The Children’s Hospital continued to be managed by two boards: an all-female board of directors, responsible for day-to-day operations; and an all-male advisory committee, responsible for significant financial and political decisions. According to historian Judith Young, when children’s hospitals moved from a home to a modern building, the influence of that all-female board of directors was usually significantly hollowed and narrowed. Basing her conclusion on a case study of Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, Young observed in the transition from social reform to scientifically based medicine a realignment of gender roles. In that case, the all-male advisory board took over all financial responsibilities as the hospital became viewed as a business rather than a charity. “Only in rare instances, after reorganization, did women manage to retain equal power with men through board representation.” [33] When the Winnipeg Children’s Hospital moved to Aberdeen Avenue, no such dramatic reorganization occurred. For example, the women’s board overruled the advisory committee when the board went ahead with its wartime construction of the new nurses’ residence, which was completed in 1918. The changes chronicled by Young occurred much more gradually and unevenly in the Winnipeg context.
This difference can be attributed in no small way to a persistent imperial perspective among many Winnipeg reformers, including Annie Bond. Bond, who arrived in Winnipeg in 1903, grew up in England, and had experience nursing in colonial wars in Africa and in New Zealand. This background certainly gave her an appreciation of what it meant to live on the Empire’s edge and empathize with those reformers burdened by their frontier anxieties. At the same time, Bond actively promoted nursing professionalization (a push to continually improve educational standards and self-regulation through licensing). While in New Zealand, Bond helped establish a nursing school in Auckland. She was likely the driving force behind the Children’s Hospital of Winnipeg School of Nursing, which opened in 1910, a year after the Beaconsfield hospital. She also lobbied the provincial government to register nurses, which it did in 1913. [34]
Having been trained at a Nightingale school, Bond experienced what historian Kathryn McPherson described as the “fundamental reconfiguration of the social relations of femininity, sexuality, and work.” [35] Nursing created an opportunity for Victorian women to work outside of the home. The growing professionalization of nursing threatened to destabilize gender relations, or as theorist Mary Poovey put it, to “expose the artificiality of the binary logic that governed the Victorian symbolic economy.” [36] The Nightingale solution involved a gendered compromise designed to create a “sexless, moralized angel,” who was “neither a mother nor a professional.” Her work was nurturing those on the ward and making sure it was clean. In other words, “to make the hospital a home” and in the process elevate an activity often dismissed as traditional women’s work. [37] This was how Bond understood professionalization, which, at least in this formulation, did not necessarily conflict with the dichotomized categories of gender.
A nurse bids farewell to a young patient leaving the city’s third Children’s Hospital.
Source: https://picasaweb.google.com/wchcentennial
The presence at the Children’s Hospital of Dr. Robert “Daddy” Rorke from 1909 to 1931 helped bolster this familial model. Dr. Rorke, “the father of Pediatrics in Manitoba,” was an ardent imperialist reformer, who considered modern American medical ideas and practices with a suspicion that bordered on disdain. [38] Rorke was born in Ontario, trained at McGill University, did most of his post-graduate study in Europe (although he spent a summer at Boston Babies Hospital), and started his practice in Winnipeg in 1906. He was Pediatrician-and-chief of the Children’s Hospital until 1931, Chief Pediatrist at the Winnipeg General Hospital, and in 1919 became the head of the new Division of Pediatrics of the Medical School at the University of Manitoba. Rorke, like many other physicians of his generation and background, believed that class and race predisposed certain people to living unhealthy lives, and emphasized the need to educate and reform lifestyles. Putting this model into practice, Rorke spent more time with his patients and their mothers than many of his younger American-trained colleagues. His practice tended to be smaller and “the poor and the medically indigent were over-represented.” [39] He submitted little to medical journals and focused primarily on teaching mothers how to properly feed their babies. He was instrumental in the founding of the milk depot at Children’s Hospital in 1915, which provided poor mothers with inexpensive infant formula. A former colleague of Rorke’s stated that other doctors, nurses and patients referred to this “patriarch-like figure” as ‘Daddy Rorke.’ [40]
With the arrival at the hospital of Dr. Gordon Chown and Superintendent Ethel Johns in the second decade of the twentieth century, Rorke and Bond’s model of care, which was so closely aligned to their reform agenda, was challenged. Dr. Chown, who trained at the Babies’ Hospital, Columbia University, brought a more “streamlined” curative approach to the hospital. [41] For example, when it came to infant feeding, he would provide mothers with a printed handout of a rigid feeding schedule. According to some, it was not uncommon for Chown or his American-trained colleagues, who tended to dispense information in a sharp, “machine-gun like delivery,” to grow impatient and scold mothers “to the point of tears” when their directions were not followed. These physicians—who emphasized scientific medicine and scientific management—often excluded mothers from the examining room if the child was uncooperative. [42]
Superintendent Ethel Johns, who trained in both Winnipeg and New York, brought in 1915 a style of care to the hospital that stressed “handling, managing and controlling.” [43] Nurse Johns professionalized the institution’s social work by combining outpatient and social services under one department. She urged graduate nurses to form an alumnae association, which they did in 1916. Johns, as principal of the hospital’s nursing school and active in a national movement to standardize nursing practices, advocated disciplined routines consistent with germ theory and a more curative approach to medicine. [44] Although her policies moved away from maternally-minded nursing and its social mission, they simultaneously strengthened the expansion of women’s movement into the public sphere. What might have troubled Bond, and almost certainly many of her fellow reformers, about these medico-scientific shifts was their subtle reconfiguration of caring in relation to curing. This re-ordering tended to diminish, though by no means eliminate, the authority (and, therefore, the power) that female reformers drew from claims to an inherent maternal capacity and skill. This was lost ground that, in the coming years, would be claimed by hospital bureaucrats, medical researchers and physicians, all male-dominated professions. These same groups would also gradually leverage the hospital’s success in selling health (i.e., curing) to more and more middle-class consumers as a way to transform its charitable character into a commodity. This change, too, would erode its social mission.
By 1925, the formerly all-female board of directors of Winnipeg Children’s Hospital had at least two male members. In an effort to address post-war debt, the board created a business manager position in 1921, which Mr. H. J. Martin filled. Martin, who applauded Johns’ efficient bookkeeping, urged the board to admit more middle-class patients. In 1924, the board appointed Dr. Gerald S. Williams as its first medical superintendent. The female Director of Nursing would no longer hold the additional responsibility of Hospital Superintendent. In 1925, Dr. Bruce Chown joined the staff of the hospital, heralding modern medical research with its laboratories, technicians and clinical investigators. The Winnipeg Children’s Hospital was no longer “essentially a women’s work.”
A 1957 photo of the medical staff at the Winnipeg Children’s Hospital included distinguished physicians Dr. C. C. Ferguson (second from right in first row) and Dr. Harry Medovy (fourth from right in first row).
Source: University of Manitoba, Faculty of Medicine Archives, MPC 3.3.14.
1. David Gagan and Rosemary Gagan, For Patients of Moderate Means: A Social History of the Voluntary Public General Hospital in Canada, 1890-1950. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002, p. 11.
2. Kurt Korneski, “Minnie J. B. Campbell, Reform and Empire” in Prairie Metropolis: New Essays on Winnipeg Social History, ed. by Esyllt W. Jones and Gerald Friesen. Winnipeg, Manitoba: University of Manitoba Press, 2009, p. 19.
3. Alan Artibise, Winnipeg: An Illustrated History. Toronto: James Lorimer and Company, 1977, p. 44.
4. Ibid., p. 68.
5. Alan Artibise, Winnipeg: A Social History of Urban Growth, 1874–1914. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1975, p. 160.
6. See Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971, p. 14, cited in Esyllt W. Jones, Influenza 1918: Disease, Death, and Struggle in Winnipeg. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007, p. 27.
7. Artibise, Winnipeg: An Illustrated History, p. 46.
8. Winnipeg Telegram, 13 May 1901.
9. Ibid., p. 53.
10. Korneski, “Reform and Empire,” p. 51.
11. Ian McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework: A Prospectus for a Reconnaissance of Canadian History,” Canadian Historical Review 81, 4 (2000): 616-678.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., p. 55.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., p. 56.
16. Korneski, “Minnie J. B. Campbell, Reform and Empire,” p. 27.
17. Manitoba Free Press (hereafter, MFP), 8 February 1909.
18. David Sloane, “‘Not Designed Merely to Heal’: Women Reformers and the Emergence of Children’s Hospitals.” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 4, 4 (October 2005): p. 333.
19. Artibise, Winnipeg: An Illustrated History, p. 104.
20. MFP, 8 February 1909.
21. Sloane, “‘Not Designed Merely to Heal,’” p. 334.
22. Mariana Valverde, The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885–1925. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1991, pp. 42, 43.
23. Archives of Manitoba (hereafter, AM), The Children’s Hospital of Winnipeg Collection (hereafter CHWC), MG 10, B 33, Winnipeg Children’s Hospital Annual Report, 1909, p. 9. Note that in some cases the numbers do not add up to match total admissions.
24. Korneski, “Minnie J. B. Campbell, Reform and Empire,” p. 19.
25. AM, CHWC, MG 10, B 33, Winnipeg Children’s Hospital Annual Report, 1909, p. 8.
26. Cynthia Comacchio, ‘Nations are Built of Babies’: Saving Ontario’s Mothers and Children, 1900–1940, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993, pp. 6, 7.
27. Kathryn McPherson, Bedside Matters: The Transformation of Canadian Nursing, 1900–1990. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003, pp. 34, 35.
28. Judith Young, “A Divine Mission: Elizabeth McMaster and the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, 1875–92,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 11 (1994): 73.
29. Sloane, “‘Not Designed Merely to Heal,’” p. 334.
30. Harry Medovy, A Vision Fulfilled: The Story of the Children’s Hospital of Winnipeg, 1909–1973. Winnipeg, Manitoba: Peguis Publishers Limited, 1979, p. 13.
31. Annmarie Adams and David Theodore, “Designing for ‘the Little Convalescents’: Children’s Hospitals in Toronto and Montreal, 1875–2006.” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 19 (2002): 203.
32. Medovy, A Vision Fulfilled, p. 17.
33. Young, “A Divine Mission,” p. 84.
34. Margaret M. Street, Watch-Fires on the Mountains: The Life and Writings of Ethel Johns. Toronto: University Press, 1973, p. 62.
35. McPherson, Bedside Matters, p. 34.
36. Mary Poovey, Unequal Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988, p. 14.
37. McPherson, Bedside Matters, pp. 34, 35.
38. Medovy, A Vision Fulfilled, pp. 37-40.
39. Medovy, “Robert Rorke (1863–1948): An Early Paediatrician,” University of Manitoba Medical Journal, 55, 2 (1985): 79.
40. Ibid., p.75.
41. Ibid., p. 78.
42. Ibid., p. 78, 79.
43. McPherson, Bedside Matters, p. 93.
44. Street, Watch-Fires on the Mountains, pp. 90, 91.
Page revised: 20 August 2016
