Medicine That Walks

A lot has been written about the breakdown of traditional Native life in Canada. Author and scholar Maureen Lux examines the medical side of this cultural erosion in her book Medicine That Walks.

According to Lux, much of what has been presented about disease and death among Natives is not the way most of us have heard it presented by exposing racist beliefs in the then-common assumptions about the health of the Native population. For example, it is often explained that Natives frequently became ill after the influx of white people to their lives and land simply because they had no resistance to these diseases, such as smallpox and tuberculosis. Epidemics of such diseases in Natives were often regarded as being the result of their supposed racial biological inferiority and unhealthy cultural practises Lux argues that it was, in fact, repressive economic, political and cultural policies that created health-related problems stemming from poverty, over-crowding and malnutrition.

Medicine That Walks originally started out as Lux's doctoral thesis. "I wanted to look at disease, and disease history and health in a social context. A social history of disease involves not just the pathogen or the disease, but how it was perceived, how it was treated, how it was perceived by the powers that be - the physicians and government," says Lux, a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Hannah Institute for the History of Medicine who lives in Saskatoon with her family.

"I found that the treatment of what happened to Native people was almost stereotypical. Native people definitely had a much higher death rate, but somehow this was understandable, it was acceptable, it was probably natural. I found this quite surprising. When I decided to do a PhD I decided to explore why this attitude is out there and if this was indeed natural," Lux explains.

While much of the academic jargon and overtones of her thesis have been removed or toned down in this version, Medicine That Walks doesn't make for light reading namely due to its often disturbing conclusions and how they relate to our society. "You start reading the stuff about the biological invasions; how the Native people were non-immune and quickly died off. It was sad, certainly, but it was happy thing for the Europeans who wanted to colonize the continent," she says.

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