Academic literature on the topic 'Bettany's Book'

CanMEDS 2005 includes health advocate. Pertinently Michel Foucault wrote “The first task of the doctor is therefore political…Man will be totally and definitively cured only if first liberated.” No one exemplified this more than Thomas Hodgkin widely known for his eponymous disease. What is less known is his unceasing work, as a Quaker, for aboriginal people around the world. He was secretary of the Aboriginal Protection Society. He had been interested in Canada since meeting John Norton, as a teenager. His involvement in the plight of Canada’s Indians may have cost him a staff position at Guy’s Hospital; the Treasurer, Benjamin Harrison, is quoted as saying “he would have no officer of the hospital who drove about with a North American Indian in his carriage.” Hodgkin played an active role in the history of Manitoba. His friend Dr Richard King undertook expeditions in Western Canada to find Sir John Franklin corresponded with Hodgkin on his anthropological observations on the Aboriginals and the treatment of them by the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC). Hodgkin campaigned actively about the management of the Manitoba aboriginals by the HBC. The presentation will illustrate this with excerpts from his letters to Sir George Simpson, Governor HBC, from Captain Kennedy who also sought Franklin and the archives of the Faculty of Medicine, University of Manitoba. He presented evidence to the House of Commons as HBC was ceded to Canada. As editor of the Colonial Intelligencer he wrote much on Manitoba and received a letter from Louis Riel. Hodgkin was passionately committed to ensure that people were free both politically and economically. Foucault M. The Birth of the Clinic. Archaeology of Medical Perception. trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Wilks S, Bettany GT. A Biographical History of Guy’s Hospital. London: Ward, Lock and Co., 1892. Kass AM, Kass EH. Perfecting the World. The Life and Times of Dr. Thomas Hodgkin 1798-1866. Boston: Harcourt Brace Johanovich Publishers, 1988.

This thesis is an exploration of ancestral narratives in the fiction of Thomas Keneally and Christopher Koch. Initially, ancestry in literature creates an historical relationship which articulates the link between the past and the present. In this sense ancestry functions as a type of cultural memory where various issues of inheritance can be negotiated. However, the real value of ancestral narratives lies in their power to aid in the construction of both personal and communal identities. They have the potential to transform these identities, to transgress “natural” boundaries and to reshape conventional identities in the light of historical experience. For Keneally, ancestral narratives depict national forbears who “narrate the nation” into being. His earlier fictions present ancestors of the nation within a mythic and symbolic framework to outline Australian national identity. This identity is static, oppositional, and characterized by the delineation of boundaries which set nations apart from one another. However, Keneally’s more recent work transforms this conventional construction of national identity. It depicts an Irish-Australian diasporic identity which is hyphenated and transgressive: it transcends the conventional notion of nations as separate entities pitted against one another. In this way Keneally’s ancestral narratives enact the potential for transforming identity through ancestral narrative. On the other hand, Koch’s work is primarily concerned with the intergenerational trauma causes by losing or forgetting one’s ancestral narrative. His novels are concerned with male gender identity and the fragmentation which characterizes a self-destructive idea of maleness. While Keneally’s characters recover their lost ancestries in an effort to reshape their idea of what it is to be Australian, Koch’s main protagonist lives in ignorance of his ancestor’s life. He is thus unable to take the opportunity to transform his masculinity due to the pervasive cultural amnesia surrounding his family history and its role in Tasmania’s past. While Keneally and Koch depict different outcomes in their fictional ancestral narratives they are both deeply concerned with the potential to transform national and gender identities through ancestry.