The account of a war surgeon who became Principal of McGill University in the midst of political, student and faculty unrest

Details geologist Dawson's 1878 exploration of the Queen Charlotte Islands. The editors have extracted comments from his journals on this area and have appended a separate report of Dawson's on the ethnology of the Native people living in the region. Includes 25 photos by Dawson. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

British Columbia inherited a legal system that granted married men control over most family property and imposed few obligations on them toward their wives and children. Yet from the 1860s onward, lawmakers throughout the Anglo-American world, including legislators on the Pacific Coast, began to grant women and children new rights. Domestic Reforms deftly analyzes the impact of the legislation, with emphasis on the ambitions of regulated populations, the influence of the judiciary, and the social and fiscal concerns of generations of legislators and bureaucrats.

This book makes it easy with its compelling collection of stories about the people who are buried at the Yale Pioneer Cemetery, an antique burial ground “at a stopping point between Fort Langley and Fort Kamloops,” BC. Established in 1858, the Yale Cemetery offers final refuge to some 300 souls, many of them among British Columbia’s earliest pioneers, including immigrant railroad labourers who toiled and died building the Canadian Pacific and Canadian Northern Railways. Here lies Dr. Maximilian Fifer, murdered in 1861 at the hands of a patient who felt the physician has mistreated him; Ned Stout, who, when he died in 1924, included Yale’s 1858 gold rush and the 1880 construction of the CPR among the memories of his 100-year lifetime; and the Elley brothers, three of at least eight children taken by scarlet fever as an epidemic tore through the town in the 1880s. As for the more than 200 unmarked graves in the Yale Cemetery, Hallowed Ground unearths their stories, too. “Yale is the focal point of our realistic and romantic history,” a passerby wrote the Yale and District Historical Society in 1980.

Officially founded in 1819, the Montreal General Hospital is recognized as a pioneering institution in North America for the many discoveries in medical research made there and for its early association with the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University - the first medical school in Canada. Covering nearly 200 years of history, The General relates the story of the hospital from its origins and founding to the transition and aftermath of its incorporation into the McGill University Health Centre in 1997. With contributions that show the perspectives of clinicians, nurses, surgeons, professors, and administrators, chapters chronicle the history of particular departments and specializations of the hospital, including cardiology, dermatology, endocrinology, neurosurgery, plastic surgery, obstetrics, emergency medicine, pathology, and radiology, as well as nursing, administration, and governance. Among the major turning points in the history of the hospital were the introduction of autopsy pathology by Sir William Osler, the debut of the electrocardiograph by Thomas Cotton in 1914, the discovery of a malignant tumour marker by Phil Gold and Samuel Freedman in 1965, its transformation from a community hospital serving anglophone Montreal to an internationally recognized academic centre during the 1950s and ’60s, and changes in governance due to the 1970 Quebec Medicare Act. Both a collective reminiscence and an extensive institutional history, The General is an engaging account of one prominent hospital’s development over nearly 200 years.