What was it like to be young and sick in the past? Who taught children how to be healthy and what were they expected to learn? In Small Matters, Mona Gleason explores how medical professionals, lay practitioners, and parents understood young patients and how children responded. During the first half of the twentieth century, particularly in the interwar decades, a number of changes took shape within the field of child healthcare - the rise of pediatrics as a medical profession, efforts to ameliorate maternal and infant mortality rates, and the shift of focus from controlling contagious diseases to the prevention of illness. Gleason makes use of oral histories throughout this period of health and welfare reform to shed new light on children's attitudes toward their medical treatment, their largely unexplored experiences of hospitalization and disability, and the importance of teachers and health curriculum to the development of "healthy habits." By focusing on children's medical treatment beyond the doctor's office, and by paying particular attention to the experience of marginalized children, Gleason makes a major contribution to the history of Canadian childhood and healthcare. The first work of its kind, Small Matters explores how children faced death, endured illness, and learned to be healthy in the context of their families and communities.

Mona Gleason, PhD, is an associate professor and the co-ordinator of the Society, Culture, and Politics in Education Program in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her research brings an historical perspective to the study of education, children, and youth in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Mona Gleason's profile page

“Small Matters is an innovative and important piece of scholarship that deserves to be read by historians interested in childhood, education, colonialism, medicine, oral history, and the family.” The Canadian Historical Review

“An excellent book that will be of great interest to scholars working in childhood studies past and present, and the history of education and health.” H-Childhood

"Well situated in both national and international scholarship, Gleason’s work makes an impressive case for the significance of size and age as important categories of historical analysis, while at the same time, arguing for a more complex and dynamic unde

"Small Matters has an excellent grasp of national and international secondary literature and is based on an impressive range of sources. The result is a rich account of majority and marginal experiences and a book that vividly captures the experiences of First Nations and rural children." Suzanne Morton, History, McGill University