Bruce. Surgeon, Soldier, Statesman, Sonofa Charles Godfrey

摘要

"Farm boy to Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario" could have been the subtitlerather than the alliterative one chosen by the author and which concluded withthe obscure neologism, sonofa. Being slow off the mark it was not until the dayafter I read it, and muttering it aloud to myself with varying emphasis, that Iconstrued it c~rrectly~. rucewanso t simply a figureheadto represent the Sovereignon state occasions and to put his signature to statutes before they couldbe proclaimed; he spent his life h reformkg zeal, sometimes towards the left,sometimes to the right, but never as a mere party hack. Consider the dizzyarray of his crusades: opposition to rigid state control of medical services; exposureof serious shortcomings in the Canadian Army Medical Corps during WorldWar I; and opposition to reform of the faculty of medicine at University ofToronto insofar ag the control of appointments passed to salaried professors ofmedicine and surgery rather than to trustees of teaching hospitals. He supportedgovernment funding for an institute devoted to the treatment of cancer;took administrative steps to clip the growing wings of quacks, herbalists, andI drugless practitioners; and struggled against anti-Semitism and racial intolerance.In 1940 Bruce berated Mackenzie King in his maiden speech in the Commonson his failure to bring the country up to Second War standards, particularlythe neglect of tank and aircraft production, the failure to provide for aCommonwealth air training program and above all the necessity for conscription.He joined the popular promotion for sterilization of feeble-minded immigrantsor at least the repeal of statutory prohibition of advice on birth control.His vaunted intolerance of anti-Semitism imperfectly spread to immigrant victimsof poverty and disease. Because of competition to his particular social interests,Bruce could not tolerate the philanthropy of Gordon Bates and his HealthLeague of Canada, which invaded Bruce's battleground where, for example,the fight against venereal disease was joined.