Grant: History of Medicine

This research examines the history of remote medicine in Newfoundland and Labrador (NL). By understanding areas of NL as regions, our study holds promise for work on other jurisdictions, for health researchers and historians alike are increasingly calling for study of health care delivery in the North and other rural regions globally. Issues in Canada today foucs on scope of practice-primary care (nurse practitioners; physician assistants; midwives; and supply of providers), access to care and to diagnostic technology-and on public vs private funding. All have earlier counterparts in NL, where studies have portrayed health care and its delivery in the pre-confederation era as inadequate to non-existent compared with that after NL joined Canada in 1949. We propose not only to examine these claims for validity but more importantly, to postulate an alternative concept that a relatively effective"ecosystem"of health care existed, suitable to the place and its population in the 1930s and 1940s. As historians, we will primarily analyze documents in hospitals and archives to understand the nature of health care before modernizaion -with clear implications for condisering what is enduring and what may have been lost in the process.