Book Review: ‘Healing Histories’ – A look at Indian Hospitals and the treatment of tuberculosis

Review by Karl Hele

Laurie Meijer Drees. Healing Histories: Stories from Canada’s Indian Hospitals. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2013.

Healing Histories is a marvelous weaving together of oral histories with the written record.  While dealing with Indian Hospitals generally, the book’s main focus involves the treatment of tuberculosis. Drees’ research and voice provides contextual information about the hospitals while providing guide posts to the book’s six sections – tuberculosis, Indian Heath Services, the Institutions, patients and families, Snuwuyulth (Indigenous medicine), and Working in Health Care.  Each backgrounder is followed by oral histories about experiences in the Indian Hospitals from the perspective of Indigenous patients, workers, and nurses, as well as the settler staff.  Together the oral histories and Drees’ research highlight the conditions in the hospital and treatments as well as cultural dislocation and shock experienced in the hospitals.

Based on the period’s medical standards, the treatment of Indigenous tubercular patients was barbaric, misguided, and culturally bereft. Fortunately, the advent of antibiotics changed the treatment of tuberculosis, making  it curable rather than treatable.  Overall, the oral histories from Aboriginals and settlers alike illustrate how western institutions were culturally myopic (albeit some medical staff encouraged traditional practices) and at the same time blissfully unaware of traditional health and healing practices being conducted within its walls.  The book itself paints a picture of a system designed to help Aboriginals, but that same system damaged cultures and peoples. Healing Histories is a must read about an understudied topic of Aboriginal past and present.