Be Wise! Be Healthy!: Morality and Citizenship in Canadian Public Health Campaigns

by Catherine Carstairs, Bethany Philpott, Sara Wilmshurst

Lose weight. Quit smoking. Exercise. For over a century, public health campaigns have encouraged Canadians to adopt healthy habits in order to prolong lives, cost the state less, and produce more efficient workers. Be Wise! Be Healthy! explores the history of public health from the 1920s to the 1970s and its emphasis on health as a responsibility of citizenship. But public health campaigns can stigmatize marginalized populations by implying that poor health is due to inadequate self-care, despite clear links between health and external factors such as poverty. This clear-eyed study demonstrates that while we may well celebrate the successes of public health campaigns, they are not without controversy.

308 pages, Paperback

Published June 28, 2019

Reviews

[Dasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book explores the development of public health in Canada between the 1920s and 1970s through an analysis of the Health League of Canada, a nonprofit health organization led by Gordon Bates, a doctor who spent time researching syphilis treatments, and centered out of Toronto. The organization began in 1919 and under the influence of social hygiene addressed venereal disease, particularly syphilis, through a moral and scientific lens. The Health League continued to engage with social hygiene and positive eugenics to encourage individuals to improve their and their family’s own health. As such, while the league rarely explicitly engaged in racist or classist language, much of their work implicitly blamed certain groups impacted by outside factors, such as poverty, to individual failings. So, while the league addressed vaccinations, venereal diseases, pasteurized milk, nutrition, and workplace health, much of this was coded in white, middle-class, and patriarchal, language. The downfall of the organization related to Bates’s unwillingness to adapt to new feminist and social thinking, let go of the league’s moralistic tone, garner new connections with provincial and federal governments and experts after the war, and often failed to secure funding as other organizations with more niche focuses than the Health League. Thus, these authors argue that while doctors and public health officials extended their efforts to remake the Canadian citizen into healthy bodies they also further stigmatized and marginalized Canadians that fell outside of the ideal.

I really enjoyed this book. I thought the focus of each chapter on the league’s specific health campaigns was useful for understanding what illnesses or concerns were prevalent during specific periods of time. Most interesting was the chapter on workplace health which saw the league stress employee health less so for the employees and more so in an effort to curb absenteeism, strikes, and unsafe food handling tactics.

[Chris B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Less than a month ago, I knew nothing about Gordon Bates or the Health League of Canada. That soon changed, as this book introduced me to the dormant organization that wielded considerable influence on the Canadian public health scene, and especially Toronto's scene, for decades. There were a few short sections that dragged, but overall it was an illuminating read.

If you have any interest in North American public health campaigns from the 20th century, then you will likely enjoy this book. The amount of research here is staggering for what amounts to approximately 200 pages in the main section. A reader gets the sense that every available issue of the League's long-running "Health" magazine was scrutinized at Library and Archives Canada by the authors, every available film reel purposed by the League viewed by the authors, and all available correspondence read by the authors.

I did particularly enjoy reading how out-of-touch with society Bates became. Thank God his late '40s attempt to ban Ingrid Bergman's films in Canada, due to her supposedly immoral behaviour, was unsuccessful.