Citation

Bouchier NB, Cruikshank K. Can. Bull. Med. Hist. 2011; 28(2): 315-337.

Affiliation

McMaster University.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2011, Canadian Society for the History of Medicine, Publisher Wilfrid Laurier University Press)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

22164599

Abstract

Municipal swimming pools arose as a technological fix for an urban public health and recreation crisis in Hamilton when its bay became a polluted sink for residential and industrial wastes. Until World War II, city leaders and medical authorities believed that they could identify, delineate, and construct safe natural swimming areas along the bay's shore, supplemented by a few public artificial swimming pools. After the war, the pollution situation worsened. For those who couldn't travel to cleaner lakeshores elsewhere, local authorities created swimming pools, thus abandoning the natural waters of the bay to the "constructive power of the profit motive".

Language: en