Scientia canadensis最新文献

This paper examines the emergence of colonial ornithology in Upper Canada, 1791-1841, to determine the impact of empire and local contexts on the natural history activity. I argue that colonial ornithology emerged as a by-product of British imperialism that helped to reinforce British, upper- and middle-class, gender-specific white identities through practices of sportsman-hunting, taxidermy, natural theology, and the romantic-aesthetic. However, as this paper reveals, British imperial practices and ideas of ornithology relied on the participation of First Nations and Métis peoples, whose knowledge and skills were instrumental to British naturalists. The First Nations and Métis peoples therefore exerted a real presence in colonial ornithology in Upper Canada--albeit a subservient one in the British ornithological texts--as they positioned themselves as part of the ornithological trade with the collection and trading of specimens. Furthermore, British military officers, settlers, and tourists tapped into American scientific networks and knowledge systems rather than focusing solely on Britain as an imperial centre of accumulation. British imperial ideas and practices of colonial ornithology in Upper Canada therefore remained ambiguous during the early nineteenth century.

British by birth Allan Cyril Brooks (1869-1946) emigrated to Canada in the 1880s, and became one of the most important North American bird illustrators during the first half of the twentieth century. Brooks was one of the leading ornithologists and wildlife collectors of the time; he corresponded extensively with other ornithologists and supplied specimens to many major North American museums. From the 1890s on he hoped to support himself by painting birds and mammals, but this was not possible in Canada at that time and he was forced to turn to American sources for illustration commissions. His work can be compared with that of his contemporary, the leading American bird painter Louis Agassiz Fuertes (1874-1927), and there are striking similarities and differences in their careers. This paper discusses the work of a talented, self-taught wildlife artist working in a North American milieu, his difficulties and successes in a newly developing field, and his quest for Canadian recognition.

Jean-François Gaultier arrived in Quebec from Normandy in 1742 and succeded Michel Sarrazin as the King's physician of the colony. His correspondence with the 'Académie royale des sciences de Paris' consisted of a meticulous description of his meteorological, botanical, agricultural and medical observations, as well as brief notes on the 'reigning diseases' (fevers, pulmonary diseases, dysenteric diseases), in this city of New France. It is important to understand that he belonged to the European movement of meteorologic medicine, an approach conceived by Hippocrates and developed by Sydenham in England during the second half of the 17th century, which aimed at establishing a tight correlation between meteorology and diseases. In the light of the actual historiography, Gaultier is the first physician to officially endorse this movement in the French colonies.

The exchange of medical and pharmaceutical knowledge was an important facet of the encounter between native and newcomer in early Canada. Throughout New France Récollet and Jesuit missionaries were given privileged access both to indigenous peoples and indigenous plants. Curiously, however, when it came to describing medical treatments, it was people, rather than medicinal plants, that were targets of what might be called "the descriptive enterprise." Attempting to divide suspect shamanic remedies from those deemed natural, missionary observers carefully documented the context of medical treatments rather than simply the specific remedy applied for treatment. Using records left by early Canadian missionaries this paper will look at the peculiar character of medical exchange in the missions of seventeenth and eighteenth-century New France to look at the interpersonal encounters that formed a constitutive element of colonial botany and framed the way in which indigenous knowledge was represented to metropolitan audiences.

This article contributes to our knowledge about the rise of the social and human sciences through an examination of military uses of psychology in Canada and this field sensibility to external demand. The national crisis caused by World War II and the Cold War were perceived by psychologists as sizeable opportunities to promote psychological expertise outside academe and to strengthen the social authority of their discipline and profession. By the way of military patronage and psychological contribution to National defense, psychological expertise then gained new symbolic and material resources. Does it mean that this field exogeneity undermine its disciplinary practices or knowledge production? It is said that this is an empirical question that bears no univocal answers.

Historians have shown that fish culturists and anglers enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship in 19th century North America. Sharing interests in producing and protecting fish for recreation, the two groups supported emerging regimes of fisheries administration and fish culture that privileged angling and game fish species. In Ontario, it has been argued that anglers achieved control of inland fisheries with help from state fish culturist Samuel Wilmot who, as a sportsman, shared anglers' recreational perspective. A closer look at Wilmot and fish culture in late 19th century Ontario, however, reveals a more complex struggle over recreational fisheries administration. I show that game fish culture under Wilmot was subordinated to fish culture programs that supported the Great Lakes commercial fisheries. Indeed, Wilmot resisted anglers' reframing of Ontario's fisheries as a private recreational resource. By the 1890s, however, this position was unpopular with Ontario's anglers and government officials, who demanded greater provincial control over recreational fisheries and fish culture. It was only after Wilmot's retirement in 1895 that game fish culture received higher priority in Ontario with both federal and provincial governments engaging in programs of wild bass transfers. In 1899, Ontario won a share of fisheries jurisdiction and established its first provincial fisheries administration, which laid the basis for more comprehensive programs of game fish culture in the 20th century.

The professionalization of Canadian anthropology in the first half of the twentieth century was tied closely to the matrix of the federal state, first though the Anthropology Division of the Geological Survey of Canada and then the National Museum. State anthropologists occupied an ambiguous professional status as both civil servants and anthropologists committed to the methodological and disciplinary imperatives of modern social science but bounded and guided by the operation of the civil service. Their position within the state served to both advance disciplinary development but also compromised disciplinary autonomy. To address the boundaries the state imposed on its support for anthropology, state anthropologists cultivated cultural, intellectual, and commercially-oriented networks that served to sustain new developments in their field, particularly in folklore. This essay examines these dynamics and suggests that anthropology's disciplinary development did not create a disjuncture between professionalized scholarship and civil society.

The absence of ordinary women from histories of science and technology may be partially explained by what has been excluded as science, as well as who have been excluded as women of science. Although the delegation of medical technology to Ontario nurses increased rapidly during the mid-twentieth century, we know very little regarding how these ordinary women engaged in science and medical technology through the everyday practice of "body work." Gender structured the working relationships between predominantly-male physicians and predominantly-female nurses, shaping the process of delegation and generating significant changes in nurses' work as well as who provided bedside care. Trained nurses parlayed these new technological skills to their advantage, enabling the extension of technological care at the bedside and assuring their roles as essential for the functioning of the hospital system.

Beginning in the 1920s, many Canadian hospitals underwent an extensive period of modernization. A wide variety of workers, generally termed "allied health professionals," began to work alongside physicians and nurses. This paper examines the history of two such groups, x-ray and laboratory technicians, paying particular attention to the ways in which technical education was transformed and, through this transformation, new occupational identities forged. Initially, those who staffed the laboratory and x-ray departments were given quick, practical instruction. In many cases, these workers continued to work in various settings across the hospital. The informal instruction of the 1920s and 1930s was displaced by formal, accredited training programs, replete with national examinations linked to a practice registry in the 1940s. Hospital administrators, the Canadian Medical Association and technicians themselves were all engaged in this transformation. At the same time, national organizations such as the Canadian Society of Laboratory Technologists or the Canadian Society of Radiological Technicians, founded in the late 1930s and early 1940s respectively, attempted to create a common professional identity with a clear scope of practice. Despite this, technical workers' professional identity remained malleable and highly dependent upon context long after the creation of supposedly national accreditation standards.