Citation

Crawford A. Lancet 2019; 394(10205): 1222-1223.

Affiliation

Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada; Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON M5T 1R8, Canada. Electronic address: allison.crawford@utoronto.ca.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/S0140-6736(19)32227-5

PMID

31591976

Abstract

Writing in his journal in 1903, from what is now Nunavut, Canada, physician Lorris Elijah Borden said of Inuit, “They are childish in their notions & are easily offended if spoken to roughly…Their morals are lax but it seems alright to them as they know no better.” Two decades later, another doctor, Leslie Livingstone, described his intervention in an epidemic using similar language: “Each family was regularly visited by the doctor and cautioned against leaving their tents until the epidemic had run its course. Like children they paid no attention and went to gossip with their neighbours.” Three decades later, physician Jon A Bildfell described his Inuit patients from the health centre in Pangnirtung as “poor paleolithic folk”. These physicians describe Inuit as childlike and primitive, rhetorically transforming them into uncooperative patients. Such depictions rationalised paternalism towards Inuit in the delivery of health care, undermined their autonomy, and devalued their knowledge of what would contribute to their own wellness and health care. Echoes of these paternalistic attitudes towards Inuit persist into the present, even if unintended...

Language: en