TELLING 1922s STORY OF A NATIONAL CRIME: CANADA'S FIRST CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER AND THE ABORTED FIGHT FOR ABORIGINAL HEALTH CARE

Abstract / Resume Over a seventeen-year career as Canada's first Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Peter H. Bryce accumulated statistics which suggested that Canada's Aboriginals were being decimated by Tuberculosis, and that the Federal government possessed the means to stop it. Eventually discharged for such reports, Bryce wrote, in 1922, The Story of a National Crime, which detailed both the evidence and the reluctance of the government to act. The resistance to his recommendations help reveal conceptual limitations in the growing professionalization of the civil service, and point to a layered and powerful set of cultural assumptions which continued to underwrite federal policy despite growing confidence in scientific and social scientific approaches. En dix-sept ans de carriere en tant que Directeur de la sante, Peter H. Bryce a rassemble de nombreuses donnees statistiques indiquant que les Autochtones du Canada etaient sur le point d'etre decimes par la tuberculose, et que le gouvernement federal avait les moyens d'intervenir. Apres avoir ete congedie a cause de tels rapports, Bryce ecrivit The Story of a National Crime en 1922. Il y presentait le detail des preuves accumulees, et y denoncait la reticence du gouvernement. Cette reticence revele les limites conceptuelles d'un service public alors en voie de professionalisation, et indique l'existence d'un ensemble de presomptions culturelles qui ont continue d'influencer la politique federale en depit d'une foi grandissante dans les sciences et dans les sciences sociales. In 1922, James Hope and Sons Limited published a paper which they sold for 35 cents a copy. The author, Peter H. Bryce, was certain that the information the paper contained was virtually unknown among the general population of the country. Its major conclusion: Canadian Aboriginals were dying, not from alcoholism or poverty as many suspected, but from communicable disease, mainly tuberculosis. As a medical expert and Canada's first Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Bryce was on a virtual crusade to wipe out this dreaded disease in Canada. His work was laced with sadness and frustration, derived both from the government's refusal to acknowledge and deal with the problem he had so long ago identified, and because this same government was impeding his own efforts to do so. This article examines the Federal career of Dr. Peter Bryce as it relates to Aboriginal health, a process which culminated in the publication of his 1922 work, The Story of a National Crime, It explores, as did Bryce himself some eighty years ago, how the same government that had hired a doctor to deal with the health concerns of Canada's Aboriginals had then reversed this commitment when the information collected revealed that much more time and money than originally planned for would be needed. The essay builds upon the body of work already completed on Bryce's findings,1 and uses Bryce's own papers to suggest that his conclusions were both a reaction to the dominant cultural dynamics of his era, as well as an example of the growing belief in a scientific discourse in the federal civil service. In addition, this paper adds a layer of complexity to the debate surrounding Aboriginal assimilation in the early 20th century. Although assimilation would have certainly been the goal of Bryce's Aboriginal policy, forced extinction was not. Moreover, Bryce challenged fundamental cultural attitudes towards the Aboriginal population at a time when many Canadians believed this civilization to be all but technically extinct. Such an attitude was, as other scholars have noted, a prevailing assumption of Bryce's superior, Duncan Campbell Scott.2 Like Scott, in the absence of substantive evidence to the contrary, many Canadians believed the Aboriginals were dying out because of their own devices, and thus common opinion held that Native-government relations seemed to conform to the structures entrenched in the Indian Act.3 Dr. …

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