A history of Toronto’s general hospital offers a window on a broader history of Upper Canada and Ontario over the last two centuries. In this lively and authoritative account, J.T.H. Connor traces the hospital’s two-hundred-year evolution, as its mandate to ‘do good’ forced constant adjustment to changing social, medical, and government attitudes.Doing Good presents the hospital’s history in three phases – roughly speaking, the first and second halves of the nineteenth cen...

Most of us know bits and pieces of our history but would like to be more sure of how it all fits together. The trick is to find a history that is so absorbing you will want to read it from beginning to end. With this book, Desmond Morton, one of Canada’s most noted and highly respected historians, shows how the choices we can make at the dawn of the 21st century have been shaped by history.Morton is keenly aware of the links connecting our present, our past, and our future, and in ...

BC Book Prize, Non-Fiction, Bev Sellars, They Called Me Number One (Finalist)Burt Award for First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Literature: Bev Sellars, They Called Me Number One (Third Prize winner)Like thousands of Aboriginal children in Canada, and elsewhere in the colonized world, Xatsu'll chief Bev Sellars spent part of her childhood as a student in a church-run residential school.These institutions endeavored to "civilize" Native c...

Black round rock faces escape from months of imprisonment below the ice and snow. Heat radiates back from the smooth rock “mountain” that provides the backdrop for the tiny village of Coppermine which is located on the shores of the Arctic Ocean. Small hands escape from mittens and crowd together on the warm dry surface of the rock, giggles escape from childish lips. Into winter weary palms the heat from the black stone creeps.The warmth carries with it memories of days without iti...

A finalist for the 1995 Governor General's Literary Award for English-language non-fictionWinner of the Mountain Environment and Culture Award at the 1995 Banff Mountain Book FestivalLeaning on the Wind is a love song of the west, sung to the tune of the wild chinook wind. Sid Marty skilfully weaves together the prehistory of Alberta with the experiences of First Nations, miners, early homesteaders and his own family. At the centre...

Frederick Banting was a surgeon and a decorated war hero when he had the idea to develop insulin in 1920, This achievement earned him the 1923 Nobel Prize for medicine, a knighthood, and the gratitude of diabetics around the world.

The ‘Spanish’ influenza of 1918 was the deadliest pandemic in history, killing as many as 50 million people worldwide. Canadian federal public health officials tried to prevent the disease from entering the country by implementing a maritime quarantine, as had been their standard practice since the cholera epidemics of 1832. But the 1918 flu was a different type of disease. In spite of the best efforts of both federal and local officials, up to fifty thousand Canadians died.In ...

Using rare interviews with former inmates and workers, institutional documentation, and governmental archives, Claudia Malacrida illuminates the dark history of the treatment of “mentally defective” children and adults in twentieth-century Alberta. Focusing on the Michener Centre in Red Deer, one of the last such facilities operating in Canada, A Special Hell is a sobering account of the connection between institutionalization and eugenics.Malacrida explains how isolating ...

Much of the ground on which Canada’s largest metropolitan centre now stands was purchased by the British from the Mississauga Indians for a payment that in the end amounted to ten shillings. Sacred Feathers (1802–1856), or Peter Jones, as he became known in English, grew up hearing countless stories of the treachery in those negotiations, early lessons in the need for Indian vigilance in preserving their land and their rights. Donald B. Smith’s biography of this remarkable Ojibwa leader sh...

In proving the existence of stem cells, Ernest Armstrong McCulloch and James Edgar Till formed the most important partnership in Canadian medical research since Frederick Banting and Charles Best, the discoverers of insulin. Together, Till and McCulloch instructed, influenced, and inspired successive generations of researchers who have used their findings to make huge advances against disease. Thousands of people who would have died from leukemia and immunological disorders now owe their l...

Great Medical Mysteries is a hilarious catalogue of medical mysteries and trivia – medical mysteries of history, mysterious addictions and everyday medical mysteries are all posed and pondered with Richard Gordon’s famed wit. The result is a deeply humorous, often bawdy, novel that explores the fancies and bodily functions of human beings through the ages. It moves ingeniously from the woman who gave birth to rabbits, to George Washington’s teeth and Hitler’s eyesight via cannibalism and a...

During the Battle of the Atlantic, Dr. George Hendry had just finished performing two major surgical operations on board the destroyer HMCS Ottawa when his ship was ambushed by 13 German U-boats. Canadian warships like Ottawa had inadequate radar sets that were incapable of detecting submarines approaching in the dark. On September 13, 1942, U-91 stole in and torpedoed Ottawa, sinking her in 20 minutes. utterly exhausted, Dr. Hendry was lost along with 113 of his...