Medicine in the Remote and Rural North, 1800–2000 by J T H Connor Stephen Curtis

Author:J T H Connor, Stephen Curtis [J T H Connor, Stephen Curtis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Health & Well Being, Medical, Reference, History
ISBN: 9781317322689
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2015-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

Medicine along the French–English Divide

By the 1920s the Medical Council had established a formalized process whereby physicians could register to practice in New Brunswick. The process focused on the standards of medical education, and the Medical Council sought to enact measures that would, in the future, open the roster only for graduates of ‘Class A’ medical schools.21 This was partly motivated in response to efforts of the Canadian Medical Association to raise and standardize licensing credentials among provinces and to encourage interprovincial licensing reciprocity. Licensing reciprocity was something the New Brunswick College of Physicians and Surgeons resisted. The Medical Council decided not to take part in any licensing reciprocity agreements with other provinces and even reserved the right to veto any applicant regardless of their training. They did, however, informally adopt the License of the Medical Council of Canada (LMCC) as the ‘gold standard’ of licensing qualifications.22

While recognizing the importance of keeping unlicensed healers out of the medical field, the actual policing role of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, at whose behest the Council Members acted, was in a state of flux throughout the interwar period. Local law enforcement and legal authorities, organized at the county or municipal level, were also sometimes slow to implement and utilize the new legislation, apparently because they found it too difficult to recruit and retain health-care professionals. If the licensing legislation was to be enforced, the Medical Council would in most cases have to launch the suit itself.

Interference in local medical affairs was politically risky for the central authority. The geographic divide between French-speaking and English-speaking parts of the province was mirrored in the geographic distribution of physicians. Apart from economic factors, it is unclear why northern Francophone districts had such difficulty recruiting and retaining doctors. But they did, and the disparity was stark. The northern New Brunswick counties of Madawaska and Restigouche, for example, had a physician per population ratio of 1:1,800 by the end of the Depression, and nearby Gloucester County on the Acadian peninsula had an even higher ratio of 1:3,000.23 At this time, ratio for the entire province was approximately 1:1,50024 and for Canada was approximately 1:1,000.25 Northern rural communities were very concerned by this state of affairs. Throughout the interwar period, the Medical Council received and tabled the receipt of letters from northern small towns and rural regions of the province that sought to recruit doctors, but the Council, for its part, considered these problems to be local ones. Only occasionally would the registrar forward community concerns to medical school officials in nearby Nova Scotia and Quebec. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the Medical Council maintained, contentedly, that ‘the number of practising physicians in this province is sufficient’.26

The health of rural residents could not have figured into their calculus. Infant mortality, long a key marker of population health, remained high in New Brunswick, especially in the northern counties. Between 1920 and 1924, the five-year mean infant mortality rate for the province hovered close to 112 deaths per 1,000 live births.

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