Where Sickness Comes From: Reading and Unsettling Medicine in the Canadian Arctic

My research project examines the written accounts of eight physicians who document their practice of medicine in the Canadian Arctic: Lorris Elijah Borden (1903–1904), Leslie David Livingstone (1922–1925), Jon A. Bildfell (1940–1942), Joseph P. Moody (1946–1949), Charlie O’Connell (1955), Otto Schaefer (1953–1985), John H. Burgess (1973–2003), and Kevin Patterson (1999, 2006). Through their life-writing practices, they enact both competency and anxiety, which are ultimately the tensions of the settler-colonial context. Discursive, affective, and visual-spatial readings of these accounts reveal how the framing of disease in the settler-colonial context engendered physician identity and rationalized the forms of healthcare established for Inuit. A discourse analysis of these accounts reveals how the clinical formulations and diagnoses advanced by these physicians transformed the Inuit patient into an uncivilized and uneducated figure, part of a dying culture ill-equipped to participate in managing their own healthcare needs. The Arctic doctor, in contrast, was knowledgeable, competent, and heroic. Affect theory shows how the reading and representation of Inuit affect, and the corollary affect of doctors, supported these discourses. The binaries used to characterize Inuit—grateful or hostile, medically compliant or non-compliant—codify the exchange between doctor and patient. Disruptive physician affects—shame, loneliness, grief—discompose the medical-settler-colonial encounter and betray their uncertainty and vulnerability. The Arctic landscape and frontier space in which the clinic is located is critical to this formation of physician identity. The photographs of landscapes and patients in the clinic bring the masterful gaze that surveys the land and the medical gaze that assesses patients into the accounts. Yet the land—vast and barren, gendered as an unwelcoming and monstrous woman—tests the physicians’ masculinity and medical assurance. Until medicine acknowledges its role in establishing and maintaining settler-colonialism, reconciliation will not be possible. More broadly, physicians can benefit from critical tools for analysis and reflection, including postcolonial and Indigenous critical perspectives. Narratives by Inuit, presented here alongside this physician life-writing, demonstrate what has been largely overlooked by these physicians and not grasped by Western biomedicine. Inuit qaujimajatuqangit is contained in narrative forms by Inuit writers and artists, and offers cultural tools for wellness and resilience.

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