Browsing by Author "Mullally, Sasha"

Now showing 1 - 14 of 14
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    African health labour of the Gold Coast: Evolution of attendant care in Ghanaian hospitals, 1860-1957
    (University of New Brunswick, 2022-04) Tomdi, Lucky; Mullally, Sasha
    This report examines African health labour in the Gold Coast (now Ghana) from 1860 to 1957 with a focus on the overlooked contribution of orderlies. In the process, it explores the intersection of race, gender and class in the recruitment of Africans into the colonial medical service. Though often referred to as ancillary and described as unskilled, orderlies deserve attention. British medical staff regularly relied on the labour of orderlies to fill in when formally trained staff like dispensers, nurses and midwives were in short supply. This research also suggests these “unskilled” orderlies were the first local African labour brought into the infrastructures of missionary and colonial medicine of the Gold Coast. This makes their essential, but under-appreciated, role important to understanding the advancement of “Western” scientific medicine into West Africa over the 19th and 20th centuries.
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    Between Community and State: Practicing public health in Cape Breton, 1938-1948
    (University of New Brunswick, 2009) Mullally, Sasha
    Using the experiences of a Nova Scotia Public health nurse, Phyllis Lyttle, this article shows how practical considerations and local needs largely defined rural public health work in the early years of the provincial system (1938-1948). Examining public health reports and community narratives reveals how Lyttle expanded her role to include primary care and midwifery services – a role similar to that of a late-20th-century nurse practitioner – in response to the needs and expectations of the local population and the local general practitioner, C. Lamont MacMillan.
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    "Care and control: the Religieuses Hospitalieres de Saint-Joseph and the administration of the New Brunswick Tracadie lazaretto, 1868-1903"
    (University of New Brunswick, 2013) Foran, Mandy; Mullally, Sasha
    Intrigued by the medical and social work conducted by the Religieuses Hospitalieres de Saint-Joseph (RHSJ), this report examines their administration of the Tracadie lazaretto between 1844 and 1903. Collectively evaluating the broader trends in the historiographies of leprosy, of nursing, and the history of Tracadie, this report aims to reveal how region and disease enabled the RHSJ to gain authority as health care and social services providers. Using Foucault's theories of power, as well as centre and periphery model of the history of nursing, this study on the cultural history of medicine explores the power of disease and the expansion of the RHSJ in northeastern New Brunswick. The remoteness and isolation of the Tracadie region, along with its lack of social and medical resources, ultimately provided the sisters with a series of opportunities to expand their services throughout the Acadian community.
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    Conceiving Christianity: Anglican women and lived religion in mid-20th century Conception Bay, Newfoundland
    (University of New Brunswick, 2014) Colleen Morgan, Laura Bonnie; Kealey, Linda; Mullally, Sasha
    Employing previously unexamined primary documents, nominal census data, official Anglican publications, oral history and material culture methodologies, this study explores lived religious beliefs and practices among Anglican women who lived on the south shore of Conception Bay, Newfoundland, in the middle decades of the 20th century. It demonstrates the making of a female theological culture informed by the material and social circumstances of ordinary women's lives as well as by the doctrines and discipline of official Anglicanism. While domestic matters influenced women's religiosity, this influence is not rooted in Anglican women's acceptance of prescribed roles related to "motherhood" or middle-class notions of women being the safe keepers of religious practice within the home. Instead, women's Christian belief and practice were shaped by the household labour they performed within the family economy. Women's popular theology was not a response to prescribed notions of what they should be domestically, but a reflection of what they were: labourers within a domestic workplace. The study considers especially connections between Christian belief and traditional female work in childbirth and mortuary services, caring for the sick, textile production, and feeding the household. Women's lived religious practices demonstrated a commitment to benevolent mutuality, the negotiation of gender roles, and resistance to male authority, suggesting a theological culture more informed by feminist consciousness than "patriarchal piety." This changed somewhat in the 1960s, as the study area transitioned from a rural, household economy to a wage-based economy largely dependent on male breadwinning. Anglican women's theological culture began to reflect their acceptance of middle-class gender expectations, as well as their emerging commitment to domesticity as an appropriate female identity within households, church and community.
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    Doctors on the Move: Physician Migration and Canadian Immigrant History
    (Canadian Immigration Historical Society / La société historique de l'immigration canadienne, 2016) Mullally, Sasha; Wright, David
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    Engineering equal opportunity: technocracy and modernity in New Brunswick during the long 1960s
    (University of New Brunswick, 2019) White, William Bliss; Mullally, Sasha
    The Program of Equal Opportunity (EO) marked a period of wide-reaching reform in New Brunswick for the areas of local government, education, health, social welfare, as well as province’s court and jail system during the Long 1960s. The province was considered by many observers to be the “social laboratory” of Canada. Devised by the government of Louis Robichaud, EO was entrenched by the Acadian premier’s immediate successor Richard Hatfield. While consistent with the literature, this project is more forceful in its assertion that the two governments constituted one policy regime. New Brunswick flirted with government by technocracy at mid-century. These technocrats, actually a cadre of officials, consultants, and bureaucrats from a wide variety of backgrounds, espoused the tenets of high and low modernism in an effort to engineer a modern polity. They provided the main bridge between the two administrations. By applying this framework and engaging with a broad literature, a nuanced account of social change in the province is revealed. Technocrats and government officials looked out and looked within the province and ultimately brought top-down change to New Brunswick during the era of Equal Opportunity.
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    Eugenic economics, institutionalization, and public health: The Mi'kmaq in Nova Scotia, 1900-1960
    (University of New Brunswick, 2022-07-21) Mrazek, Courtney; Mullally, Sasha
    This study interrogates how the settler Canadian state and its various extensions conceptualized, treated, and fiscally regulated Indigenous bodies in varied healthcare settings. The twentieth century saw the modernization of Canada’s three levels of governments and their bureaucratic health processes. These structures evolved and developed into the current Canadian healthcare system, which continues to reproduce and perpetuate health inequities and inequalities for Indigenous people through structural violence that is entrenched in a health system born from the colonial period. Specifically, this dissertation examines healthcare policies that shaped and affected Indigenous health structures, both formally and informally, and analyzes how they were developed and implemented in specific moments and locations in Nova Scotia. It argues that eugenic ideologies directly shaped monetary decisions, which undermined an entire population’s health and well-being. Simultaneously, the Canadian settler state created oppressive living conditions that not only facilitated but promoted the medical community’s ability to take advantage of Mi’kmaw patients -- adults and children alike - - for surveillance, dispossession, purposes of racialized knowledge production, and research. A regional framework of analysis is crucial in examining how federal Indigenous health policies manifested diverse provincial and municipal health procedures within a national network of surveillance. Foregrounding region and place, this study contributes to our collective understanding of Maritime Indigenous health as it pertains to policies, fiscal procedures, and eugenics. It adds another dimension to the existing body of scholarship on the history of Mi’kmaq and their relationship with the Canadian settler state. Moreover, it balances the historiography on Canadian Indigenous health. And while not negating the profound consequences of traumatic and ongoing settler colonial violences perpetrated by medical institutions, this study also relies on Mi’kmaw life-writing and acts of agency to balance colonial archival sources and amplify previously and intentionally oppressed Indigenous voices.
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    Patrolling the medical margins: The hospital ship Strathcona III and community relocation in northern Newfoundland and Labrador, 1949-1974
    (University of New Brunswick, 2023-12) Matchim, John R.H.; Mullally, Sasha
    This dissertation explores the history of the Strathcona III (1964-1974), the last hospital ship built for the International Grenfell Association (IGA). The IGA was a philanthropic health care provider that operated in northern Newfoundland and Labrador between 1893 and 1981. To make its services more accessible to rural-remote fishing communities, the IGA developed a decentralized system of small hospitals, nursing stations and hospital ships. By revisiting a wide range of clinician autobiographies and other forms of life writing, analyzing clinical case records, and applying a spatial history analysis to the Strathcona III’s activities, this study shows that the ship was primarily built in response to the continuing high incidence of tuberculosis. Ultimately, this work links the Strathcona III’s health services to contemporaneous community relocation programs that sought to move people from small fishing communities to larger ‘growth centres.’ Faced with overcrowded housing, where tuberculosis flourished, and high unemployment, many relocated people returned to their old homes each summer to make a living from the fishery, leading the IGA to construct a new hospital ship that could accompany them. This is not to say that the intentions of the state could not be coopted or subverted. While the Strathcona III was designed to conduct mass x-ray surveys for tuberculosis, coastal peoples were also able to access a range of other medical services. The ship provided a vital support to fishing peoples whose way of life was considered ‘backwards’ in a modern industrial economy. By continuing to fish from summer stations local people were able, at least indirectly, to influence IGA policy and address their particular needs. Additionally, applying a circumpolar, historical framework to these activities connects the IGA to international trends. The emerging historiography of global health and the rise of ‘big medicine’ shows how economic ‘modernization’ programs, military buildups, and marine-based public health surveys in Canada were also occurring at the same time in many other parts of the circumpolar North Atlantic. Thus, interconnected projects of tuberculosis control and community relocation in northern Newfoundland and Labrador can be seen as parts of a larger set of global projects.
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    "Restorative in its effect, economic in its result": a re-interpretation of occupational therapy in Canada, 1914-1928
    (University of New Brunswick, 2016) Hicks, Christine Marie; Mullally, Sasha
    This MA report examines the motivations behind creating the profession of occupational therapy in Canada between 1914 and 1928. It re-interprets the dominant historical view that occupational therapy programs were designed to holistically heal soldiers through rehabilitative work. Instead, it argues that occupational therapy was created with the goal of restoring soldiers as economically viable men. Guided by the ideology of possessive individualism, programs advanced the notion that men needed to be independent breadwinners to uphold Canada’s position in the global economy. Three groups of people involved in and associated with the founding of occupational therapy—its bureaucratic leaders, its professional leaders, and its practicing ward aides—believed occupational therapy’s main purpose was not to create a fully healthy man, but to ensure that he was able to function well enough to hold a job. The government, concerned with keeping the cost of vocational re-training low and its programs efficient, also viewed occupational therapy as a way to speed up convalescence by ensuring men began to work as soon as they left the battlefield. This trend continued in the post-war period with occupational therapy being used to save money for businesses and insurance companies by restoring workers in a cheap and efficient way. In this way, OT regimes were created as government-run programs of vocational re-training.
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    The decline of the international ladies’ garment workers’ union: Shifting workers’ identities in Montreal and New York City
    (University of New Brunswick, 2022-03) MacDonald, Katherine; Mullally, Sasha
    A part of the labour movement for ninety-five years, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) worked to better the conditions of garment workers across North America. Although they saw gains for workers in the garment industry over fifty years of progress, in the last forty years of the ILGWU’s history, the union faced a dramatic decline. Large membership losses and a weakening of negotiating power in the industry left the ILGWU a shell of their former self. What happened to this union? This declension did not begin with rapid membership decline, but a steady drop in members was a symptom of missed opportunities and misunderstandings on the part of union leadership of the increasingly diverse needs of garment workers across North America. Using the ILGWU in Montréal and New York City from the 1960s to the 1980s, this dissertation highlights the intrinsic difficulties of with transnational unionization efforts in the late 20th century. The ILGWU’s could not maintain a collective identity for garment worker across North America. Shifting identities made it difficult for the union to maintain their membership and motivate nonunionized workers to join the organization. The decline of this powerful and important labour organization offers critical insights into women’s history and labour activism at the end of the 20th century and reveals new elements of the history of capitalism, especially as it relates to ethnicity and gender.
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    The midwife next door: a history of Prince Edward Island midwives 1900–1950
    (University of New Brunswick, 2021) Doucette, Emma Lynn Michaela; Mullally, Sasha
    Using oral history interviews collected by Prince Edward Island “pastkeeper,” Dutch Thompson, this report provides insights into the lives and practices of PEI midwives from 1900 to 1950. From the turn of the twentieth century, this report analyses the decline of home births and the rise of hospital births, which became the normal childbirth experience on PEI by the 1950s. It investigates aspects of Island midwifery such as the central roles that midwives held within their communities, their interprofessional relationships with Island doctors, and how one midwife created her own maternity home when the institutionalization of births was a growing trend. This report argues that in the rural areas of Prince Edward Island where poverty was common, the economy of mutual aid made midwives essential to the health of Islanders who could not afford doctor fees. In this favour-based economy where travelling long distances was uncommon, community members often looked to neighbour midwives for medical care, seeking to repay services with favours rather than with cash. This economy of mutual aid slowed the shift from home births to hospital births in rural areas of the Island and it also encouraged doctors to respect the role and place of midwives in the healthcare system.
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    The representation of primary care and primary health care in New Brunswick health policy: A critical discourse analysis
    (University of New Brunswick, 2022-08) Davies, Bronwyn; Thompson, Janice; Mullally, Sasha
    In Canada, the social practice of health care is organized hierarchically, privileges some groups over others, and reinforces power relations that enforce constraints over directions in which health care as a social practice can move (Turner, Keyzer, & Rudge, 2007). In this research, I focus specifically on the discourses of primary care (PC) and primary health care (PHC) and how these discourses are evident in health care reform and the implementation and ongoing practice of nurse practitioners (NP) in New Brunswick (NB), Canada. The distinctions between the discourses of PC and the broader PHC are not always clear or consistently represented. Based on my experience in the healthcare field, the general lack of consensus on what constitutes each discourse and differential support for each discourse creates challenges for interprofessional collaboration, health care provider role exploration, patient-centered care and health system reform and transformation (Muldoon, Hogg, & Levitt, 2006). I use critical discourse analysis to investigate how government documents and discipline-specific documents from nursing and medicine organize and advocate for health care reform. Discourse analytic work in this research draws on the influence of Foucault (1972, 1973, 1977, 1988); Bacchi (1999, 2000, 2012 a,b,c, 2016) and Fairclough (1992, 1995, 2003, 2010) to explore overlying impacts of governmental, professional and organizational policies on individual and community health. These analyses of PC and PHC in health policy reveal consistencies, contradictions, and gaps between the meanings of these discourses and their effects. The overall analyses of the 12 selected policy texts from government, medical and nursing professions, revealed emerging discourses, diverging discourses, and converging discourses. Converging or intersecting discourses included the use of neoliberal discourse in close relationship with PC. There was clear evidence of how these two combined discourses (PC and neoliberalism) argued for improved access to PC at a lower cost, with effects that attenuated the presence and influence of PHC. The presence of PHC diminished steadily in the government policy texts and was rarely (if ever) present in the medical text. This pattern was in contrast to the nursing texts where there was more continuity demonstrated in sustained use of PHC over the 30 years examined. Within the government texts, a hybrid neoliberal-PC discourse emerged that favored PC and included some elements of PHC. Government, texts, although advocating for reform, also subscribed to fiscal responsibility and value for money discourse. Nursing texts promoted PHC reform but also broader scopes of practice and greater responsibility for the profession of nursing. The medical text, although somewhat aligned with government reform direction around interdisciplinary PHC teams, promoted continued authority and privileged positions for physicians. The introduction of NPs in 2002 did not significantly change the complex privileging and related hierarchal power structure which remained relatively unchanged over the 30 years examined. The study points to far-reaching implications for addressing health inequities. PHC committed to social justice and health equity is critical in addressing health inequities. It requires coordinated action from a broad scope of health care professionals working together in teams rather than the narrow scope of primary medical practice, remunerated by fee-for-service payment, which remains the dominant model of community care in the province.
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    Visualizing the Past: Mapping, GIS, and Teaching Historical Consciousness
    (2016) Mullally, Sasha; Hanratty, Siobhan
    Available publicly via activehistory.ca: http://activehistory.ca/2016/07/visualizing-the-past-mapping-gis-and-teaching-historical-consciousness/
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    “Why bilingual? Why not?”: Historicizing French immersion and the impact of Canadian parents for French in New Brunswick, 1969-1992
    (University of New Brunswick, 2019) Rogers, Gabrielle; Mullally, Sasha
    This report examines the social history of French immersion in New Brunswick. It uses statistical evidence from the provincial Department of Education as a complement to oral interviews to describe the birth and growth of immersion programming in Canada’s only bilingual province. Provincial education for French immersion is situated within the broader scope of emerging national and provincial bilingualism and bilingual identity. It also considers the regional perspective. The growing immersion program was a times in conflict with the spirit of Louis J. Robichaud-era policies such as the Program for Equal Opportunity. It also speaks to the growth and evolution of institutional and personal bilingualism in the province.