Rockefeller Foundation Funding and Medical Education in Toronto

Extract

Marianne Fedunkiw presents an extensively researched study of the Rockefeller Foundation's patronage of medical school reform in Canada. The author ably synthesises primary sources from provincial and university archives, as well as from the Rockefeller Foundation archives, with a broad range of published scholarship on the historical development of medical professionalisation, education and philanthropy in the US and Canada. The main body of the monograph traces the historical evolution, and subsequent impact, of Rockefeller funding on medical schools at the University of Toronto, McGill University in Montreal, and Dalhousie University in Halifax. Rockefeller Foundation Funding affords the reader a rare opportunity to observe the contrasting historical trajectories of medical education in Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia. These comparisons represent one of the important contributions of this volume to the historiography of Canadian medical education. Equally compelling is the chapter surveying the connections between the Rockefeller family and Foundation, Canadian philanthropists such as the Masseys and Eaton families (of Toronto and Nova Scotia), Prime Minister MacKenzie King and Sir William Osler. Fedunkiw nicely details how these international networks facilitated Rockefeller benefactions for Canadian medical reforms.