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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 carrière en tant que Directeur de la santé, Peter H. Bryce a rassemblé de nombreuses données statistiques indiquant que les Autochtones du Canada étaient sur le point d'être décimés par la tuberculose, et que le gouvernement fédéral avait les moyens d'intervenir. Après avoir été congédié à cause de tels rapports, Bryce écrivit The Story of a National Crime en 1922. Il y présentait le détail des preuves accumulées, et y dénonçait la réticence du gouvernement. Cette réticence révèle les limites conceptuelles d'un service public alors en voie de professionalisation, et indique l'existence d'un ensemble de présomptions culturelles qui ont continué d'influencer la politique fédérale en dépit 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...