Description
Book SynopsisA history of Toronto’s general hospital offers a window on a broader history of Upper Canada and Ontario over the last two centuries. In this lively and authoritative account, J.T.H. Connor traces the hospital’s two-hundred-year evolution, as its mandate to ‘do good’ forced constant adjustment to changing social, medical, and government attitudes.
Doing Good presents the hospital’s history in three phases – roughly speaking, the first and second halves of the nineteenth century, and the twentieth century. From its conception in 1797 to the mid-1850s – it did not actually acquire a home until 1819 nor occupy it until 1829 – it functioned as a charitable institution, catering to the sick poor. It acted initially as a clearing station for sick immigrants; it later was deeply affected by political events and became embroiled in the medical turmoil of Toronto in the 1840s and early 1850s. In the second era, from the mid-1850s
