January 30, 2006 - 4:00pm
Our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents are lucky to have survived childhood, according to a new book co-edited by Malaspina University-College history professor Dr. Cheryl Krasnick Warsh.
"It was very dangerous to be a child at the beginning of the last century, especially in Montreal, where the child mortality rate was higher than in any other part of the western world," said Krasnick Warsh. "If you lived past your first year you were lucky."
The book, Children's Health Issues in Historical Perspective, was released November 2005 by Wilfrid Laurier University Press and is already in several university curriculums including Malaspina’s. Krasnick Warsh co-edited the book with Canada’s foremost women's historian, Veronica Strong-Boag, who teaches Women’s Studies and Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia.
The book started as a thematic issue of the Canadian Bulletin of Medical History/ Bulletin canadien d'histoire de la medicine, of which Krasnick Warsh is editor-in-chief.
"We decided the topic was so popular that there was enough for a book," said Krasnick Warsh.
The book contains 17 articles written by medical history specialists from around the world. Krasnick Warsh found a lot of similarities in children’s health care over the past 150 years, especially among countries of the British Commonwealth like Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
Children’s health isn’t always about illness, but about child-rearing practices, nutrition and sanitation, said Krasnick Warsh.
One of the most fascinating articles in the collection is by Alabama pediatrics specialist Dr. Hughes Evans called "Physician denial and child sexual abuse in America 1870-2000".
"I found it to be the most shocking of all the reports," said Krasnick Warsh.
"It shows what can happen when public attitudes about power relationships within the family prevail despite scientific evidence, especially when it affects a group with no voice."
According to the article, it wasn’t until the 1970s when physicians began to recognize the full extent of sexual abuse of children. The physicians believed a child who had a sexually transmitted disease had acquired it from another child, not from an adult. At the time they thought childhood gonorrhea was spread between children by contaminated toilet seats. Today that belief continues to affect us – public toilet seats still have a gap in front to protect children from touching the seat, even though we now know STDs are not transmitted that way, said Krasnick Warsh.
In Canada, knowledge and prevention of children’s health issues didn’t improve until after the First World War.
"The wastage of our young – the capital for the future – justified public health measures for reasons of nationalism," said Krasnick Warsh. "There was a new value placed on our children."
Today, child mortality rates are at an all-time low in developed countries like Canada thanks to advancements in vaccinations and public health care, she added.
Besides teaching the history of Canadian women, health care, families and popular culture at Malaspina, Krasnick Warsh is also the author of Moments of Unreason: The Homewood Retreat and the Practice of Early Canadian Psychiatry, 1883-1923 (McGill-Queen's Press, 1989); Drink in Canada: Historical Essays (McGill-Queen's Press, 1993); and co-editor of The Changing Face of Drink: Substance, Imagery and Behaviour (University of Ottawa Press, 1997). Krasnick Warsh is working on her fifth book, "Women’s Health in North America 1800-2000", which will soon be published by Broadview Press.
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