Remember the abuse and deaths of First Nations’ people as reported a couple of months ago? In a NewScientist (7 August 2021, paywall) interview with Samir Shaheen-Hussain there’s a bit more horrifying information:
Roxanne Khamsi: Were you aware of the scale of the involvement of the medical community in the residential school system before writing your book?
Samir Shaheen-Hussain: Oftentimes, we only thought of it as being run by the government and churches, which is the case. But what was a surprise to me was the extent of the active role of physicians and scientists in causing suffering to these kids and certainly not preventing death – and potentially even sentencing these kids to death in many cases. …
In 2015, [the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada] estimated that up to 6000 children died at the schools, many from tuberculosis. Why did that disease run so rampant?
There are several reasons. One is that the schools were notoriously poorly ventilated. The kids were often forced to live in close quarters. From an infectious disease perspective, that is going to make it much easier for tuberculosis to spread. The other element is that children were systematically malnourished, if not starved. And if you’re malnourished, you’re not going to be able to mount much of a defence against various infectious diseases, including tuberculosis.
What role did physicians play in exacerbating the tuberculosis outbreaks?
In the early 1900s, Indigenous children who were being taken away from their families and put into residential schools had to get a medical certificate. Physicians in that context could have played a role in making sure that children who had tuberculosis, for example, were not allowed to go into residential schools.
Similarly, even when tuberculosis was endemic in many of these schools, which it was, they could have prevented healthy children from going into them. Physicians could have played a role in essentially shutting down the entire residential school system by saying that it’s not a healthy place for Indigenous children. But that didn’t happen.
And …
In the summertime, some of these kids went back to their community and then TB would spread to many in these communities as a result – if it wasn’t already there.
Scientists and doctors are heir to the same flaws of the flesh mind as is everyone else. It’s not surprising, though – morality is a system of thought, not unlike that of chemistry, but with regard to voluntary behavior rather than the prescribed behaviors of elements and molecules. As such, it requires study and digging at foundations, just as most breakthroughs do. Accepting its current conclusions, as many of these doctors did, is easier.
In this regard, one might as well just blame the Catholic Church, again, as a purported custodian of morality.
