Small Matters

The following is excerpted from Small Matters: Canadian Children in Sickness and Health, 1900-1940 by Mona Gleason.

Mattie Clarke was three years old in 1916. Born in Winnipeg, she had three siblings and lived in a modest house with her father, employed as a barber, and her mother, who tended to home and children full time. Once a week, her mother took her to the Children’s Hospital to tend to a throat ailment. “There was something wrong with my throat,” she recalled, “but I don’t remember what they did to fix it.” During her visit, Mattie would be “knocked out” by anesthesia, treated, and carried back home by her mother. “She would have to carry me from the streetcar, which was a great long block, and I’m sure she must have been exhausted since I wasn’t a little skinny kid, I was a fat kid!” When the deadly influenza pandemic of 1918 hit the city, Mattie was five years old. She remembered that it killed many people in the city, but her family was spared much first hand experience. “We didn’t have any time to be sick,” Mattie recalled.

In 1935, eleven-year-old Catherine Tilley, born in Bing Inlet, Ontario to a family of eleven children, suffered a high fever caused by measles. She dreaded going to sleep during her illness.

Megumi Itou was born in Ocean Falls, British Columbia in 1941. Evacuated to Iron Springs, Alberta with other Canadians of Japanese descent during the Second World War, Megumi remembers “growing up poor” after her family’s assets were taken away by government order. Along with around twenty-five hundred former residents of Ocean Falls, the Itous were forced to begin their lives again. Her father did farm labour and her mother remained at home, in charge of Megumi and her five siblings. Megumi’s mother was also in charge of ensuring that, as much as possible, illness was avoided. To this end, she prepared many tonics and other home remedies to ward off illness. Hot lemonade, made with lemon peels, soothed cold symptoms and was a good source of vitamin C. Megumi remembered begging her mother to add sugar or honey to the lemonade, taming the sour taste and turning it into a welcome treat. When more serious illness occurred, Megumi remembered that she had to eat pickled garlic. “If the pickled garlic came out,” she recalled, “I knew I had to get better very quickly.”

John Brennan was born in 1942 in North York, Ontario and contracted polio when he was five years old. He was hospitalized for two months at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children (HSC) and then spent six months in a wheelchair. Two aspects of this experience stand out in his memory: his complete isolation from his family during his hospitalization and the painful injections he had to endure. “I remember getting the big needle. It seemed like it was six miles long at the time,” he recalled. While walking to choir practice several years after he had recovered much of his mobility, John was hit by a car. He was hospitalized again, but only for three days. “I guess they were just watching me more than anything else,” he reasoned, “because I didn’t break any bones or anything. I guess they were watching for internal injuries or something.” John remembered that “they had to call another ambulance to the accident scene because the first one was driven by my dad.”

The memories of Mattie, Catherine, Megumi, and John suggest the important place that health and the body – burdensome bodies, fevered bodies, sick bodies, injured bodies – occupy in memories of growing up. Excerpted from longer oral history interviews, the memories give us some sense of what it felt like to be sick as a child in the past. They speak to the central place that context, home, and family played when illness or injury struck, how fear and apprehension could accompany professional medical treatment, and how such treatment was far from uniformly experienced or even uniformly relevant. In other oral histories included in this book, adults recall time spent in hospital or in bed with fever, serious injuries, or encounters with death and disease; the varying degrees of success associated with medicines handed over by doctors or concocted in kitchens; and lessons in school about proper nose-blowing or inoculations in the school gymnasium. Amidst the unique richness of each individual story of growing up, the intertwined centrality of home, family, and the body – especially in memories involving health and illness – marks a common theme.

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