When the CBC organized a national contest to identify the greatest Canadian of all time, few were surprised when the father of Medicare, Tommy Douglas, won by a large margin: Medicare is central to Canadian identity. Yet focusing on Douglas and his fight for social justice obscures other important aspects of the construction of Canada's national health insurance - especially its longstanding dependence on immigrant doctors.

Foreign Practices reconsiders the early history of Medicare through the stories of foreign-trained doctors who entered the country in the three decades after the Second World War. By making strategic use of oral history, analyzing contemporary medical debates, and reconstructing doctors' life histories, Sasha Mullally and David Wright demonstrate that foreign doctors arrived by the hundreds at a pivotal moment for health care services. Just as Medicare was launched, Canada began to prioritize "highly skilled manpower" when admitting newcomers, a novel policy that drew thousands of professionals from around the world. Doctors from India and Iran, Haiti and Hong Kong, and Romania and the Republic of South Africa would fundamentally transform the medical landscape of the country.

Charting the fascinating history of physician immigration to Canada, and the ethical debates it provoked, Foreign Practices places the Canadian experience within a wider context of global migration after the Second World War.

Sasha Mullally is professor of history and associate dean at the School of Graduate Studies at the University of New Brunswick.

Sasha Mullally's profile page

David Wright's profile page

• Long-listed, Wilson Book Prize

"Now more than ever, we need scholarship which lifts the history of medicine out of national silos and sets it in proper global context. Mullally and Wright give an expert demonstration of this approach, founded on meticulous research into medical migration which moves deftly between individual experience and broader patterns. The result is a study which not only enhances our understanding of Canada's health politics, but also illuminates the underpinnings of professional mobility in an earlier era of globalisation." Martin Gorsky, Centre for History in Public Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

“One of the many strengths of this study is the sustained effort to weave together the lived experiences of immigrant doctors and the policy environment in which they worked. The contrast between the speedy acceptance and apparent acculturation of the early migrants is striking. As we prepare for a postpandemic world, more than ever, the insights provided by studies of this nature make clear that health policies and their implementation rarely play out the way that their advocates intended. Using historical analysis provides the nuance and complexity that are needed to ensure that twenty-first-century policymakers have the background knowledge to “build back better.”” Social History / Histoire Sociale