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Cette thèse examine le processus de la médicalisation de la maternité dans la province méridionale chinoise du Guangdong entre 1879 et 1938. En explorant ce phénomène à travers l’œuvre médicale missionnaire menée dans la région, cette analyse tente de voir comment la prise en charge médicale des parturientes, puis des futures et nouvelles mères chinoises a pu se traduire sur le terrain, en parallèle ou en dehors des politiques gouvernementales pour le moins limitées. Elle met particulièrement en lumière les manifestations locales de ce processus et l’appréhende selon la perspective des principales concernées : les femmes. Espérant convertir les populations féminines, les missionnaires chrétiens présents dans le Guangdong, particulièrement ceux appartenant à la mission presbytérienne américaine, ont développé une offre de soins qui répondait à la norme sociale chinoise de la ségrégation sexuelle. Au sein des établissements de santé spécialisés ou adaptés à l’accueil des femmes, ils ont également organisé des maternités, ainsi que des services de santé maternelle et infantile, chargés d’étendre la prise en charge des parturientes en amont et en aval de l’accouchement. Si leurs efforts ont pu être en partie freinés par la double position de subordination qu’occupaient les femmes dans l’organisation sociale confucéenne, il n’en reste pas moins que les missionnaires ont rencontré plus d’une sociétés chinoises dans le sud de la Chine et que certaines de ces particularités locales ont facilité, dans une certaine mesure, leurs efforts de médicalisation. Étant moins soumises à la ségrégation des sexes et plus impliquées dans l’économie familiale, y compris en dehors du foyer, qu’ailleurs en Chine, les femmes du Guangdong ont été relativement nombreuses à compléter des formations médicales et infirmières dans les programmes missionnaires. Par conséquent, la profession médicale a connu une véritable féminisation/sinisation, et cette région du monde s’est révélée être un terrain beaucoup plus propice à l’innovation sociale et à l’émancipation des femmes que bien des pays occidentaux. Principales forces motrices de la médicalisation de la maternité, les femmes, professionnelles comme profanes, soignantes comme patientes, n’ont pas que reçu passivement les normes, les savoirs et les pratiques de la médecine occidentale. Elles ont négocié ce modèle sur la base de leurs repères socioculturels et ont contribué à en redessiner les contours, faisant passer la médicalisation par un réel processus de naturalisation.

Deprived of his land inheritance like many youngest-born of peasant descent, Martin Bertrand (1915-2008) eventually fled life as a seminarian in the French High-Alps by enlisting in the Mobile Guard and then being stationed in Casablanca, Morocco in 1941. Following the Anglo–American invasion of French North Africa, he was drafted in 1943 to lead a Moroccan colonial recruit unit. With “his” tirailleurs, he took part in the Italian campaign, the Provence landing, the liberation of Alsace, and the occupation of Germany. After the War, he returned to Morocco only to be deployed 3 years later with the same battalion to Tourane, Indochina where the French colonial administration attempted to retake control of the region. During each one of his long absences, Martin Bertrand wrote almost daily to his wife Hélène, descendent of Spanish settlers established in Algeria. By analyzing these letters, this master’s thesis proposes to integrate Martin Bertrand’s experiences, in his functions as a non-commissioned officer in a colonial regiment, into a broader imperial story where France led her armies through her last colonial wars and destabilized the colonial order under which each soldier was governed. Furthermore, this study compares Martin Bertrand’s private letters with more official sources like troop morale reports which allows for an analysis of the complex social and ethnic hierarchies between French non-commissioned officers and “indigenous” troops. At the same time, it explores the deeper questionings of a military intermediary’s self-identity.

The Decade of Vaccines is a comprehensive review of the history of vaccines in the Canadian province of Quebec, a province in mutation attracted by alternatives to biomedicine, backed by a dynamic process of hierarchization of health risks. This chapter examines vaccine hesitancy as a spectrum of situated individual and collective behaviors regarding immunization to highlight the vaccine selections that resulted from the political and sanitary emancipation of a society in mutation. The examination of these hesitations determinants brings to light the impact of the political and sanitary emancipation of a society in mutation attracted by alternatives to biomedicine, backed by a dynamic process of hierarchization of health risks. Analysis reveals, apart from the imprint of the new sciences of vaccinology and immunology, the weight of the state disengaging from mass prevention programs, supported in this direction by the hospital-centered healthcare system and the metamorphoses of contemporary public health. It is in these historical contexts that rational, even innovative, and simultaneously plastic and autonomous forms of preventive moderation unfold. The author notes that the return to mandatory vaccination, which has been enforced or implemented here and there in recent years, in the United States as in Europe, cannot constitute a solution to a societal phenomenon that is constantly adjusting. While the exploration of personalized vaccines remains in the realm of utopia and the pandemic risk has once again materialized, it would be good to rethink what public health means and to reinsert with tact, pedagogy and listening vaccination as a common good.

Based on a comparative study of the communities that migrated from India to French Indochina and British Burma, this thesis examines the place of Indian migrants in these two colonies during the first half of the 20th century. Indian minorities had a special place in the colonial system because of their various legal status, political and economic influence, and intermediary roles. These dynamics and the interest in studying them are illustrated by three specific case studies: 1. the dispute between Indian police officers and the municipality of Saigon in 1907; 2. Negotiations during the separation of Burma from the British Raj in 1935; 3. the repercussions of the 1929 stock market crash on government discourse on these communities and their place in colonial settings. The interaction of Indian minorities with colonial administrations indicates their understanding of imperial workings. They illustrate their skillful navigation of government structures and their mobilization to defend their interests. The analysis of their position as intermediaries highlights how minority communities have used their relationships to bypass lines of authority and power and sheds light on the plurality of hierarchical axes in colonial situations. These three case studies provide a more holistic conceptualization of colonial Indian minorities and support their complexity, highlighting their ambiguous allegiances and how they define and redefine themselves. The colonial authorities' speeches on those communities highlighted the link between the desirability of Indian minorities and Indian minorities and the need for their presence in the two colonies. This thesis helps deepen our understanding of what an empire is and the complex place that groups deemed homogenous and marginal may have occupied within it.

In 1988, British gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield describes a new type of phenomenon. According to his Since 1970, specialists have noticed an upsurged in the amount of diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in Quebecois children and children across the world. Once considered “unfortunate souls” suffering from an “unknown illness”, autism is now a disorder the public is now well-aware of, and on which multiple studies were conducted. However, with the publication of a study in 1998 claiming the origins of the disorder is the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine (MMR vaccine), the conversation on autism is now polluted by the question of its origins, to the point few people have considered the portrayals of autism and autism in the period leading up to this publication, when the years 1970 to 1990 represent an important period in terms of the evolution of autism’s markers and its treatments, in Quebec in particular. To this end, a series of articles from daily newspapers La Presse and Le Devoir concerning autism over the period 1970-1998 were analyzed in order to highlight three important axes in the present research: the characteristics of autism, the causes of the disorder as well as the care of autistic people, and in particular, young autistic people. From this analysis, we first retain a transformation in the perception of the autistic, where the ‘idiot’ child of the 1970s becomes a misunderstood genius in the 1990s. Simultaneously, we note the appropriation by popular discourses of the role of parents (and mothers especially) on the origins of autism, as well as the popularization of the myth of giftedness in the 1990s. In order to answer these questions, the present dissertation hopes to question the thickness, complexity and temporality of these representations, and do so by trying to observe if those representations interact or are independent from each other during this period, and if we see through the press tensions between discourses used by both communities, or a mixture of mutual appropriations.

This book addresses topics such as oracle bones, the treatment of women, fertility and childbirth, nutrition, acupuncture, and Qi. It also examines Chinese medicine as practiced globally in places such as Africa, Australia, Vietnam, Korea, and the United States

The influenza pandemic of 1918–1920, which killed 50 000 Canadians, spurred the creation of a federal department of public health. But in the intervening century, public health at all levels has remained, as Marc Lalonde put it in 1988, the “poor cousin” in the health care system (Lalonde 1988, p. 77). Punctuated by sporadic investment during infectious disease crises, such as polio in the early 1950s, public health is less of a priority as the cost of tertiary health interventions rises. While public health potentially involves a broad range of interventions, this paper focuses on the history of public health interventions around infectious disease. COVID-19 has forced us to relearn the importance of maintaining basic infectious/communicable disease control capacity and revealed the cost of our failure to do so. It has also drawn our attention to the intersection between social inequality, racism, and colonialism and vulnerability to disease. In addition to investing in our capacity to contain disease outbreaks as they occur, we must plan now for how to achieve greater health equity in the future by addressing underlying economic and social conditions and providing meaningful access to preventive care for all. This is how we build a truly resilient society. Governments at all levels have recognized the importance of social factors in shaping health and illness for decades. But greater health equity will result only from genuine action on this knowledge. Action will arise from public advocacy in support of prevention, and a new level of engagement and collaboration between affected individuals and communities, public health experts, and governments.

Context: In Quebec, Bill 31, adopted on March 18, 2020, extended vaccination to pharmacists. Despite many advantages, this new practice comes with public health issues reinforced in the context of COVID-19. Therefore, it is essential to understand the opportunities and challenges of the participation of community pharmacists in influenza vaccination, from a public health perspective by (i) describing the year of 2020-2021 influenza vaccination offer, (ii) its opportunities and challenges, and (iii) its impact on the accessibility of this service newly offered by pharmacists to the most vulnerable people. Methods: This research is a case study from one of the most affected areas by COVID-19 in Canada: Laval. Our method combines documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews with health professionals and public health actors (n = 23). Researchers used a thematic analysis to analyze these results. Results: Most partners (pharmacists, public health administrators) underlined multiple opportunities of this new practice, ie, pharmacists who can vaccinate, particularly for chronically ill patients. However, structural and strategical challenges remain. More specifically, vaccination seemed to only rely on a “first come, first served” basis, which questions public health objectives of vaccination, such as equitable access. Conclusion: The introduction of new actors, such as pharmacists, represents a major opportunity to improve vaccination coverage and reduce the burden of COVID-19 on the health system. However, this delegation of a public health activity to the private sector undoubtedly requires closer coordination with public health institutions.

“Vaccine hesitancy” is a concept now frequently used in vaccination discourse. The increased popularity of this concept in both academic and public health circles is challenging previously held perspectives that individual vaccination attitudes and behaviours are a simple dichotomy of accept or reject. A consultation study was designed to assess the opinions of experts and health professionals concerning the definition, scope, and causes of vaccine hesitancy in Canada. We sent online surveys to two panels (1- vaccination experts and 2- front-line vaccine providers). Two questionnaires were completed by each panel, with data from the first questionnaire informing the development of questions for the second. Our participants defined vaccine hesitancy as an attitude (doubts, concerns) as well as a behaviour (refusing some / many vaccines, delaying vaccination). Our findings also indicate that both vaccine experts and front-line vaccine providers have the perception that vaccine rates have been declining and consider vaccine hesitancy an important issue to address in Canada. Diffusion of negative information online and lack of knowledge about vaccines were identified as the key causes of vaccine hesitancy by the participants. A common understanding of vaccine hesitancy among researchers, public health experts, policymakers and health care providers will better guide interventions that can more effectively address vaccine hesitancy within Canada.