The Life of Saint Tommy

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Humanities as participants in the “health” industry, or got yelled at by their supervisor. apart from them, the glass that locks the whether as workers or patient. I could Lots of reasons not to quit today. outside out. Even when I’m not pre - write a really thought-provoking theo - I look at my watch. It’s time for me tending to be a researcher, I still put a retical piece arguing that smoking on to go back to work, with real people comfortable distance between them out the sidewalk resists oppression inherent that I have to interact with and can’t there in the cold, and myself in my within both the institutional policies and just observe. But I sit for one moment warm hospital. The divide that sepa - the value-laden efforts at “health pro - longer, watching as a woman in a grey rates me, a physician and a nonsmoker, motion” that these policies collude with. coat, about my age, lights up one last from the people who do that sort of Then again, I wonder what reasons cigarette. And I think, all the real action thing; go for a smoke in the snow. the smokers would give. Maybe they takes place at “the boundary,” doesn’t would just say they wanted a smoke. it? There are the smokers, crossing the Lara Hazelton MD They’re under stress, I’m sure, all of line to where smoking is no longer pro - Psychiatrist Halifax, NS them. Someone they love is upstairs hibited. And here I am watching from dying. They just worked a double shift, the other side of the boundary keeps me CMAJ 2012. DOI:10.1503/cmaj.110482

Books The life of Saint Tommy

Lam is so unflinchingly reverential Tommy Douglas Vincent Lam that his book can be taken as nothing Penguin Canada, Extraordinary Canadians other than hagiography. Douglas even series; 2011 gets in some miracles. (How else to explain that federally funded health care was enacted on a national scale, not by he typical biographer either the socialist Cooperative Common - sharpens his subject’s horns or wealth Federation, but by Diefenbaker’s T polishes his halo. (A third option Tories?) Not that this devotion need be a — mundane agnosticism — is rarely bad thing. Douglas is surely the patron attempted.) Toronto emergency physi - of Canadian health care, so where is the cian Vincent Lam reveals his choice harm in treating him as such? early in Tommy Douglas : Lam’s boy - What’s disappointing, then, is not hood aspiration to become a physician, that Lam tries to canonize Douglas, but he explains in the first chapter, came that he is not, on the whole, more spir - from a desire to “... serve people irre - ited about it. After initially crediting spective of their wealth ... [and] get paid Douglas for his life-changing decision a d without handing any patient a bill ...” a to become a physician, Lam-the- n a C

The health care system that allows believer is replaced as narrator by a n i u

Canadian doctors to practice with such g bland follower whose ideas are put for - n e altruism is Tommy Douglas’s most P ward as drab Sunday school rote: “To famous legacy, and the battle for the mak - most Canadians, it has become a core ing of this system is Lam’s passion in this remainder of Douglas’s life seems to be part of our national ethos that health book. Lam’s novel, Bloodletting and much less inspiring for Lam, resulting in care should be equally available to all Miraculous Cures won the 2006 Giller a fairly plodding whitewash job. Dou - regardless of ability to pay.” Where is Prize. In this biography, he turns the eye glas’s tireless energy, his practical piety the contemplation, the revelation? What of a fiction writer to the conflict between and his commitment to principle are might have been a personal and mean - Douglas, the “poor immigrant boy whose demonstrated again and again. His short - ingful book about one man’s faith in parents had no money to pay for the spe - comings, on those rare occasions when the ideas that Douglas represents is cialized treatment he needed [for they are mentioned at all, are turned to instead stale dogma. osteomyelitis],” and the Saskatchewan advantage: Douglas’s “atrocious” French doctors who go on strike despite “a clear language skills, for example, permit him Paul Moorehead MD public mandate to proceed on medicare.” to be “motivated not by politics or affin - PhD student Pathology and Molecular Medicine This tale is told with zeal, fittingly for a ity with a particular group but by a deep Queen’s University David-and-Goliath story. respect for civil rights” when he opposes Kingston, Ont. Unfortunately, this briskly told tale the invocation of the War Measures Act occupies only one chapter and the during the October Crisis of 1970. CMAJ 2012. DOI:10.1503/cmaj.110957