This Month at Canada's History

Tim Cook, the military historian, has a new book on first aid and medicine in the First World War, and he complements it with a cover story in October's Canada's History that considers Dr John McCrae not so much as the author of "In Flanders Fields" as part of an innovative field hospital in France, the "McGill hospital," that Cook makes into a case study for how Canadian medicine went to war.

By war's end about half of all Canadian doctors and a third of all nurses had served in uniform, and the Canadian Army Medical Corps had expanded from twenty officers in 1914 to over twenty thousand members.

Cook argues that in trauma medicine -- and also in preventive care and what became public health -- skills and practices the field hospitals developed came back to Canada with the doctors and nurses who served there

One quibble: I wish the military historians would not always start their First World War stories with, as Cook puts it: "As a dominion in the British Empire, Canada was at war when Britain declared war on Germany on August 4, 1914. There was a great rush of men to the colours." By now we really ought to recognize and underline the intermediate step between the first and second sentences: namely, the Canadian parliament met to decide just how and to what extent Canada would participate in the war now declared. Only after the Canadian decisions -- the real commitment to the war effort -- could the rush to the colours be accommodated.

Also this month, archaeologists and preservationists from Montreal's Pointe-à-Callières museum present a remarkable digital recreation of the Canadian parliament building that was torched in 1849 in downtown Montreal.

Lately, Canada's History the magazine (there's also the substantial web presence) has recreated a section called The Beaver, to cover "traditional" topics the old magazine emphasized when it was a fur trade, HBC, and northern-history mag. But how the traditions have changed! The contents of this Beaver section are mostly by indigenous authors privileging indigenous points-of-view on the fur trade ("Founding Fort Severn" by Jean-Luc Pilon and Chris Koostachin), on treaty relations ("All Treaty People" by Karine Duhamel), and on residential schools ("National Crime" by Miles Morriseau). And Bill Waiser on a shipwreck in Wager Bay that's not part of the Franklin story. 

Also -- be still my west coast heart -- a look at the fiftieth anniversary of "The Beachcombers." If you subscribed, you'd already have it all.