Ottawa's Burden: Fort Churchill and Military Nursing in Northern Canada, 1945–1975

Between 1949 and 1964, Canada's Department of National Defence owned and operated the Fort Churchill Military Hospital in northern Manitoba. As one of only two military hospitals in the country to treat civilian patients, the other being Whitehorse, Fort Churchill played a unique and critical role in the provision of federal health services in the postwar period. This article centres the experiences of military nurses in the Hudson Bay area of northern Canada, using the rise and fall of Fort Churchill's hospital, to investigate Ottawa's approach to medical governance. Military medicine is more than a wartime or overseas phenomenon, and it is incumbent upon medical historians to consider domestic military contexts in peacetime as a crucial component of Canada's twentieth century health history.