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      • HARVEST
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      'That's how I saw it anyways': Foucauldian genealogy toward understanding an historical outbreak of amebiasis in Loon Lake

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      Date
      2015-10-23
      Author
      Wiebe, Lesley
      Type
      Thesis
      Degree Level
      Masters
      Metadata
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      Abstract
      This thesis explores the utility of the conflated term “colonial medicine” by drawing on events during an historical outbreak of amebic dysentery that occurred on several Indian Reservations near Loon Lake, Saskatchewan, during the 1960s and ‘70s, including a series of government-sponsored drug trials conducted to stem the outbreak. Largely devoid of the racialized notions characterizing primary documents used by previous scholars of ‘colonial medicine’, the medical journal articles, government memorandums, and letters written by physicians in connection with the outbreak and trials reveal their immersion in ‘la clinique’, or an anatomo-clinical discourse similar to what theorist Michel Foucault described in Birth of the Clinic. Conversely, conversations with Loon Lake area community members on the subjects of the outbreak and trials reveal their multiplex and nuanced reactions to medical and colonial discourses. Arguably, then, when writing about past events, historians should weigh ‘medicine’ and colonial discourse separately. Essential methodological consideration was given to the Foucauldian concept of ‘disinterring’ popular knowledge. Drawing on Foucault’s edited works Power/Knowledge and I, Pierre Riviére, the subjugated knowledges of Aboriginal community members, physicians, sanitation workers, and government employees gleaned through interviews and text are contrasted as per his example in these works with the false functionalism of ‘scientificity’. Moreover, when considered in tandem, these subjugated knowledges illustrate a ‘structural violence’, following anthropologist Paul Farmer’s methodology for describing such phenomena in Pathologies of Power. Overarchingly, they obscure the paradigmatic dichotomies (‘doctor’/‘patient’, ‘patient’/the healthy person, ‘colonizer’/‘colonized’, ‘oppressor’/‘oppressed’) espoused in medical, colonial, and even post-colonial discourses. This understanding forces the reflexive recognition that–if we accept rhetorician Christopher Bracken’s assertion in Magical Criticism there is a recourse to savage philosophy within academia–what we say as historians has consequence beyond discourse, possibly creating new ‘subjects’ in a Foucauldian, disciplined society.
      Degree
      Master of Arts (M.A.)
      Department
      History
      Program
      History
      Supervisor
      Carlson, Keith T.
      Committee
      Handy, James; Zellar, Gary; Bidwell, Kristina
      Copyright Date
      January 2014
      URI
      http://hdl.handle.net/10388/ETD-2014-01-1481
      Subject
      history
      ethnohistory
      Aboriginal history
      Aboriginal health history
      medical history
      Saskatchewan
      Loon Lake
      amebic dysentery
      amebiasis
      metronidazole
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      • Graduate Theses and Dissertations
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