5/5/2023 0 Comments Itrace medical ca![]() For his socialist views, however, he would eventually be hounded out of the United States through the intimidation of the McCarthy era. On 30 January 1939, Sigerist graced the cover of Time magazine. However, others were taken with his Soviet example and the notion that medicine could concentrate on disease prevention (Davis, Reference Davis1938). Some medical reviewers condemned Sigerist’s book as ‘propaganda’, deriding a historian for daring to comment on contemporary health care (C.B.F., 1938). He warned that North American medicine was emphasizing technological over social progress. In his prominent book on Soviet medicine (Sigerist, Reference Sigerist1937), Sigerist had expressed the idea that medicine should develop along simultaneous, parallel lines of social and technological progress, with research in both. The erudite, Swiss-born Sigerist was a physician and professor of history at Baltimore’s prestigious Johns Hopkins University medical school. As part of Queen’s University Centennial celebrations in 1941, Wallace awarded honorary doctorates to James and to Dr Henry E. Neither were physicians, but they were interested in equitable health care delivery and the programs used in Russia, an ally in the struggle against fascism. Advisors to Ottawa on post-war reconstruction included Principals Robert Wallace of Queen’s University and Cyril James of McGill. Organized medicine was skeptical of the municipal doctor scheme, although it enjoyed attention and imitation from Alberta, Manitoba and the United States.ĭuring the hostilities of World War II, groups of citizens and policy makers began to plan for post-war economic and social organization, seeking ways to avoid a collapse like the Depression of the early 1930s. Other solutions to funding health care included the Saskatchewan Municipal Doctors scheme, which from 1916 had brought health care to remote, prairie towns, while guaranteeing decent incomes for medical participants (Lawson, Reference Lawson2005). Insurance offered security to people who could afford it, but the fees were often beyond reach for middle-class citizens and the poor. He understood how illness could devastate homes both emotionally and economically. In the interwar period, some doctors ran private insurance companies, including Associated Medical Services (AMS), which was founded 80 years ago in 1937 by Queen’s University medical graduate, pathologist Dr Jason A. Consequently, opposition might be seen as an aspect of stewardship, slowing, shaping and even strengthening medicare by highlighting its potential and perennial problems a gardening metaphor springs to mind – between fertilizer and pruning shears.īefore MEDICARE: Canadian Association for Medical Students and Interns (CAMSI) and the Soviet exampleīefore medicare, ill health could ruin a family’s finances. Doctors who helped create and sustain medicare have been few in number many more have been vocal opponents. ![]() According to the Oxford dictionary, stewardship is ‘the job of taking care of something’. ![]() I added the negative in the title to allow for the possibility that physicians have not been stewards of medicare. It will be shown that doctors supporting medicare were always in a small minority, usually young, idealistic and motivated by public-health concerns – and that, in response to various crises, successive groups of medical supporters of medicare rose up to replace their predecessors.įirst, a caveat. It will close with an example of how physicians could display greater stewardship of social determinants. This paper will trace physician involvement – support and opposition – to medicare from its inception to the present, with special attention to small physician organizations that have supported medicare. ![]() Some opponents are unaware that medicare was a boon to Canadian physician income, and many fail to connect their participation in medicare with responsibility for improving health outcomes through social determinants and equalizing access to care – although that was, and still is, its purpose. They opposed it frequently, fearing loss of income and individual autonomy. However, from the origins of state-administered medicare to the present, the majority of physicians have not been strong supporters. Physicians are deeply invested in Canadian medicare because it is through medicare that they are paid. ![]()
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