“Compare and Contrast: The Context and Impact of Canadian International Geological (1913, 1972) and Mathematical (1924, 1974) Congresses”

David Orenstein (Toronto District School Board, Retired)

Starting in 1857 with the Montreal Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Canada has hosted a series of varied and important international scientific congresses. This paper looks at the higher level similarities and differences for the context and impact of two pairs of such congresses.

The International Mathematical Congress came to Toronto in 1924 when the American Mathematical Society had to rescind their offer to host that year. Before World War I, U. of T. had successfully hosted the International Geological Congress in 1913. Toronto was prepared to handle the short notice, having hosted the AAAS in 1921. it was also preparing the 1924 Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

In the wake of the highly successful Expo '67, the World's Fair in Montreal celebrating Canada's Centennial, geologists and mathematicians returned to Canada. The IGC was held in Montreal in 1972 and the ICM at Vancouver's University of British Columbia in 1974.

While the earlier pair of congresses illuminate the changes wrought in the world's scientific communities by the upheaval and carnage of World War I, both 1970s congresses reflected the Cold War confrontation between the the United States and the Soviet Union along with the allies of both.

“Glacier Naturalism and Claiming Canada's Mountains”

Dani Inkpen (Harvard University)

Canadian historians have shown how in the late-nineteenth century the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) and the federal government promoted a national myth according to which the railway stitched together a vast geography, bringing the west into confederation. Historians of science have had little to say about this history, but not for lack of relevance. In this paper I show how early glacier study in North America was enmeshed in the production of this national myth, which used glaciers to sell the idea of Canada. The first systematic studies of glaciers on the continent began in the 1880s in the Rocky Mountains and Selkirks of western Canada; after 1885, access to this terrain was facilitated by the CPR. These studies were natural historical, relied heavily on photography, and were made by mountaineering naturalists and tourists; after 1907, increasingly by members of the Alpine Club of Canada (ACC). For founding members of the ACC, glacier study was explicitly patriotic, a way of “claiming Canada’s mountains for Canada”—possessing knowledge of glaciers brought them and their terrain into the nation. Yet, non-Canadians also contributed to this myth through their entanglements with the CPR. The CPR provided glacialists with passage, equipment, and free labour; in return, glacialists made their photographs and studies available to the railway. The same photographs and studies used to introduce glaciers to learned audiences in Philadelphia and New York graced the promotional material of the CPR, which proclaimed possession of “50 Switzerlands in one!” for the new nation.

“How Ontario’s Health became Public, circa 1882”

Kenton Kroker (Science & Technology Studies, York University)

While the “bacteriological revolution” might have transformed biomedical research, its impact upon the principles and practices of late-19th century public health is less certain. The stock-in-trade of public health quarantine, patient isolation, mass vaccination, health surveillance invoke questions regarding the limits of state power over its citizens. Public health is political. But public health is also a field of expert knowledge. This dual nature makes public health an exceptional object by which historians can examine the interactions of scientific knowledges public spheres. These interactions can be codified as a response to a deceivingly simple question: how did health of populations become public?

Following Barbara Gutman Rosenkrantz’s classic 1972 study of public health in Massacheusetts, I describe the evolution of public health in Ontario during the 1880s as a locally-negotiated attempt to harmonize natural and social worlds. Ontario, like Massacheusetts, was home to a powerful public health bureaucracy. But its vast, rural character, its geological diversity, its geographic situation as an international crossroads, its powerful position within confederation, and its economic reliance upon forestry heavily shaped the way scientific experts framed the public’s health as a question of scientific governance. The morality of hygenic behaviour, like germ theory, certainly played a role. But so, too, did meteorological accounting, colourful maps, newspapers, lay testimony, sawmills, dams, fouled air, free postage, status-seeking physicians, and forms purloined from neighboring Michigan. Place, it seems, mattered to Ontarians. Experts responded by “scaling up” public health from its urban origins to better promote its cause.