Documenting Disease: Ontario's Bureaucracy Battles Tuberculosis
Abstract
In appraising archival records, it is important to understand not only their content, but also their form and function. While content will usually narrate what happened historically, an analysis of form and function may reveal that the records had a determining effect upon the course of history itself. Up until the middle of this century, tuberculosis was a disease that claimed numerous lives in Canada. In Ontario, the Department of Health's Division of TB Prevention dealt with the problem by launching a paper assault and virtually documenting it to death. Two record-keeping systems were particularly useful weapons in the war on TB: the local TB case registers and the mass X-ray surveys. Both information-gathering systems served to seek out and identify people with TB in order that the disease could be contained and eliminated. The government's bureaucratic role was as important to the decline of TB in Ontario as were the antibiotics administered by the medical community.
RÉSUMÉ
En évaluant les dossiers archivistiques, il est non seulement important de comprendre leur contenu, mais aussi leur forme ainsi que leur fonction. Alors que le contenu révèle habituellement ce qui est arrivé, une analyse de la forme et de la fonction peut révéler que les documents eux-mêmes ont eu un effet déterminant sur le cours de l'histoire elle-même. Jusqu'au milieu du présent siècle, la tuberculose était responsable de nombreux décès au Canada. En Ontario, la Division de la prévention de la tuberculose du Ministère de la santé a mis sur pied un vaste programme de quête d'informations qui a contribué à l'éradication de la maladie. Deux systèmes de gestion de documents représentèrent une arme utile dans la lutte contre la tuberculose: les registres locaux d'enregistrement des cas de tuberculose et les enquêtes radiographiques. Les deux systèmes de collecte des données ont servi à identifier et à repérer les personnes atteintes de la tuberculose et ainsi à contenir et à éliminer cette maladie. Les décisions bureaucratiques du gouvernement ont joué un rôle dans l'éradication de la tuberculose au même titre l'administration d'antibiotiques par la communauté médicale.
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