Be Wise! Be Healthy!

Lose weight. Quit smoking. Exercise more. For over a century, governments and voluntary groups have run educational campaigns encouraging Canadians to adopt healthy habits in order to prolong lives, cost the state less, and produce more efficient workers.

Be Wise! Be Healthy! explores the history of public health in Canada from the 1920s to the 1970s. Through the Health League of Canada, people were urged to drink pasteurized milk, immunize their children, and avoid extramarital sex. Health was presented as a responsibility of citizenship – and doctors and dentists as expert guides.

Public health campaigns have reduced preventable deaths. But such campaigns can also stigmatize marginalized populations by implying that poor health is due to inadequate self-care, despite clear links between health and external factors such as poverty and trauma. This clear-eyed study demonstrates that while we may well celebrate the successes of public health campaigns, they are not without controversy.

Catherine Carstairs is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Guelph. Her publications include Jailed for Possession: Illegal Drug Use, Regulation, and Power in Canada, 1920–1961 and Feminist History in Canada: New Essays on Women, Gender, Work, and Nation, edited with Nancy Janovicek.

Bethany Philpott is a family medicine resident at Queen’s University, Belleville-Quinte.

Sara Wilmshurst’s research on the Health League of Canada sparked her interest in nonprofit organizations, and she now works in fundraising.

Erika Dyck, professor and Canada Research Chair in the history of medicine, Department of History, University of Saskatchewan:
A fascinating analysis of how a voluntary organization, the Health League of Canada, stimulated public discussions about the health of Canadians. This book pushes the scholarship in new directions by addressing the tensions and synergies between clinical and public health.