3 - Colonial Motifs and Medicine

Summary

This chapter examines the stories told about early epidemic disease in the North by Elders, missionaries, traders, and eventually anthropologists. Here we consider the implications of how we interpret evidence of past epidemics in the North to understand how often disease arrived with Europeans and thereby strive for a better understanding of how northerners could respond to novel pathogens. The absence of major smallpox epidemics is discussed in detail. The severe epidemics in the 1860s led the HBC to hire a physician, William MacKay, who along with missionaries provided medical care to the Mackenzie district posts. Colonial biomedicine existed alongside, and was still secondary to, traditional healing practices. This chapter considers some of these practices and the introduction of new tools to deal with new pathogens.