The deadly cost of poverty

By Olivia Bradbury / Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Thorough physician that he is, when Dr. Rick Cooper heard that Newfoundland children born prior to Confederation did not fare as well health wise as children raised in Canada, the longtime Janeway Hospital pediatrician had to look into it.
Cooper worked at the Janeway for 48 years, specializing in infectious diseases. He was also active at Memorial University’s medical school, serving as professor and chair of pediatrics. He is now retired as a professor emeritus of medicine. His first book, Janeway: 50 Years of Caring for Children, was published by Boulder Books in 2017. This year, Boulder published his second book: Only a Baby Gone: Child Health & Welfare in Newfoundland Before 1949. As the name suggests, the book focuses on the health and well-being of children on the island prior to Newfoundland’s union with Canada.
Cooper said his research confirmed there was indeed a difference —infant and child mortality rates were much higher in Newfoundland than in Canada, and poverty was extensive in the outports.
“We were different, and I had to then study and try to find out how we were different,” said Cooper. “And it was very difficult because children were invisible in the history books. There was very little mention of children as people in the history books. They talked about families sometimes, but not much. It was all about politics, wars, or the economy, etcetera.”
Most of the settlers who came to Newfoundland in the couple of hundred years preceding Confederation were very poor, especially those from Ireland.
“They lived in very isolated communities with no roads, no way of communication, no health,” Cooper said. “(They had) a little bit of religion, which made a big difference, but not much else.”
The poor people in the outports, including children, survived by having their own gardens, cutting wood for fuel, and building houses and boats. They were illiterate due to a lack of schools. “And they didn’t have time to go to school as children because they were working hard all the time,” said Cooper.
Granted, in the 1700s, poor children were treated badly everywhere. Children were owned by their fathers and had no rights. There were no laws against child abuse. Orphans had nowhere to go. When Governor William Waldegrave visited Newfoundland in the late 18th century, he was shocked by the condition of orphan children. He and some of the governors who succeeded him established orphanages, both Protestant and Catholic. They also started schools, and people started to collect money and goods to help the poor.
Cooper said the poor in St. John’s were different as they lived in the slums.
“There was no land so there was nowhere to dispose of body waste,” he pointed out. “If a dog died, it rotted on the streets. The stench in the summertime was unbearable. And they blamed the people that lived in the slums, but they had nowhere to go. They were poor. A lot of them couldn’t make it in the outports.”
Many settlers brought diseases to Newfoundland and ended up living in shacks with no running water or sewage.
“No wonder the infant mortality would have been high,” Cooper said.
High mortality rates were also caused by epidemics of infectious diseases such as typhus, cholera, smallpox, and so on. Other diseases, such as meningitis and tuberculosis, were ongoing as well. In the 1880s and 1890s, in Europe, Britain, and the United States, doctors identified the causes of tuberculosis and cholera and started vaccine programs. They also started surveillance, quarantining ships that arrived. “All this helped child health, because if a ship comes in full of cholera, guess who gets it: the poor people in the slums,” said Cooper. “And the mortality (rate) from cholera in a child less than two years is a hundred percent.”
The Newfoundland Commission of Government, which governed the island and Labrador from 1934 to 1949, did a lot to improve the health of the people. However, the infant mortality rate from tuberculosis remained higher than anywhere else because both the Commission of Government and previous governments had ignored the poverty and lack of food people had. Unsanitary surroundings and a lack of nutrition contributed to the deaths of many infants and children. The island became more prosperous after 1950, and also benefitted from the worldwide discoveries of vaccines and the understanding of good public health. Hospitals were built and helped children, lowering the mortality rate a little more. Significant changes in child health were made by public health authorities.
“They brought the vaccines, they did surveillance, and they made sure that the food we ate was clean and the water was purified, and that sewerage was properly disposed of,” said Cooper. Education had become mandatory for children between the ages of seven and 14 in 1942, and the Faculty of Medicine opened at Memorial University in 1969.
The opportunities for children today are good, said Cooper. He noted the vaccine program in Newfoundland is the best in Canada, and better than any vaccine program in the United States. “We’re up to the high nineties of children getting immunized, and down in the U.S. it’s down in the seventies in some places,” said Cooper.
He condemned the current U.S. government’s move to cut support for the Centre for Disease Control. “Everyone in the world relies on that place to tell them where the diseases are, what vaccines they need, and it’s gone,” said Cooper. “So there’ll be chaos now, there’ll be measles everywhere. But not in Newfoundland, not in our children anyway, because we’ll immunize them with two doses.”
Cooper said he wanted to include information on Indigenous people and the people of Labrador in this latest book, but the editors advised him that it would be too wide a scope. So, he focused on the English-speaking immigrants from Ireland and the United Kingdom. When it came to gathering information, Cooper said he got a lot of help from The Rooms and the Centre for Newfoundland Studies at Memorial University.
Cooper is not yet sure if he will write another book. He first wants to see the reaction to Only a Baby Gone. People can purchase the book from Boulder Books, which can send copies via mail if requested. The book is also available at bookstores and grocery stores.