When Canadians contemplate the potential for another pandemic after experiencing severe acute respiratory syndrome in 2003 and novel H1N1 influenza in 2009, they generally turn to the Public Health Agency of Canada website for information about the most effective ways to protect themselves and their families. But why do we expect the federal government to provide this information and to coordinate a national pandemic plan? Have Canadians always been able to rely on the federal government to fight disease and protect citizens’ health?
The Last Plague: Spanish Influenza and the Politics of Public Health in Canada by Mark Osborne Humphries, a military historian at Memorial University, is an ambitious attempt to examine the history of public health governance from 1832 to 1939 using the influenza pandemic of 1918 as the pivotal event that prompted the creation of a national health...
Heather MacDougall, a professor at the University of Waterloo, is an expert in Canadian public health history. Her recent project, “Making Medicare: The History of Health Care in Canada, 1914–2007”, is an overview of health policy. She is currently examining vaccine resistance in Ontario between 1850 and the present.
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