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Dr. Peter H. Bryce: Bold & Relentless Public Health Pioneer

By: Dr. Christopher J. Rutty

Contributing Historian

Christopher J. Rutty, Ph.D., is a professional historian with special expertise on the history of medicine, public health, infectious diseases and biotechnology in Canada. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto in the Department of History, with his dissertation on the history of poliomyelitis in Canada. For his Ph.D. Christopher was supervised by the late Professor Michael Bliss, author of the seminal book, The Discovery of Insulin, which serves as the foundational source for much of the insulin story he has developed for the “Insulin 100” project. Since completing his Ph.D. in 1995, Dr. Rutty has provided a wide range of historical research, writing, consulting and creative services to a variety of clients through his company, Health Heritage Research Services. Dr. Rutty holds an Adjunct Professor appointment in the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health. He has also curated prominent historical exhibits, including on the discovery of insulin, most notably for the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine to mark the 90th anniversary of the discovery. Dr. Rutty has also published several articles on the history of insulin, as well as books on the history of public health in Canada, the history of the Canadian Nurses Association, the history of St. Mary’s General Hospital in Kitchener, ON, as well as numerous articles in print and online on the history of polio and the history of vaccines.

The May 1882 issue of the Canadian Journal of Medical Science included a brief news item: “Dr. P.H. Bryce, of Guelph, has been appointed Secretary to the Ontario Board of Health.”^[i] Almost exactly 40 years later, Bryce (1853-1932), who had been forced to retire as Canada’s Chief Medical Officer of the Department of the Interior, self-published a scathing pamphlet entitled, The Story of a National Crime: Being an Appeal for Justice to the Indians of Canada. Bryce, who held the position of chief medical officer for 18 years, charged the Canadian government with “criminal disregard for the treaty pledges to guard the welfare of the Indian wards of the nation.”^[ii] He accused the government of neglecting to address seriously the deadly toll of tuberculosis among the Indigenous population, especially children in residential schools, despite the best medical, scientific, and public health advice provided to the government by the nation’s undisputed authority on the subject — Bryce himself. 

Bryce’s strong sense of justice and his fearlessness in calling out political leaders and bureaucrats for their often-willful neglect of scientifically sound public health advice is evident throughout his bold and energetic 40-year career.^[iii] In 1882, he began as Ontario’s first full-time Chief Health Officer, presiding over Canada’s first permanent Provincial Board of Health. In one of Bryce’s first publications, written in 1885 in the wake of one of Canada’s worst smallpox epidemics, Bryce began by confessing to his fellow members of the American Public Health Association (APHA): “I feel in some measure as if I stand before an audience in whose eyes I shall be likened to the lawyer for the defence in a criminal action at court, since, while in the eyes of the sanitary world a crime has been committed, – that of having an epidemic of small-pox in Canada, – I shall appear to many to be defending the case of a criminal who has been bold enough to say ‘Not guilty.’” While he felt diffident in appearing before the association, his more immediate fear was “being accused before my own countrymen of being unpatriotic, by reason of having told this association, and through it the American people, that Canadians are, judging from the stern logic of facts, far behind the age of sanitary matters; that they have a low estimate of the value of human life; and that there exists in Canada a disregard from law, such as the people of this Glorious Union are strangers to.”^[iv] As Bryce told his audience, enough was known about smallpox and how to control and prevent it with a vaccine that had been around for almost a century, that there was simply no excuse for an epidemic to be happening in the first place. In his mind, willful neglect was inexcusable.

Montreal in 1885 was in the midst of a major smallpox epidemic that left some 3,154 people dead, almost all of whom were unvaccinated. The crisis had been amplified by medical misinformation in the press and French/Catholic-English/Anglican political and religious tensions, all exacerbated by the absence of public health leadership at the municipal and the provincial levels.^[v] As Ontario’s chief health officer, Bryce was determined to limit the spread of smallpox into Ontario. He took the unprecedented step of extending his reach across the provincial border. This was done by sending medical inspectors to Montreal to inspect any train or boat transporting passengers, luggage, freight, or other effects bound for Ontario ports and to request medical certification of successful vaccination within the previous seven years. By seeking to limit the spread of smallpox from Quebec into Ontario, Bryce was also cognisant of a responsibility to prevent its further spread, especially into neighboring U.S. states. At the time, while the Canadian government, through the Quarantine Act, exercised control over the importation of major infectious diseases via immigration stations at coastal ports and on Grosse Isle in the St. Lawrence River, it paid little attention to the U.S. border and had no means of infectious disease control over provincial borders.^[vi] 

In recounting the management of the 1885 smallpox epidemic, Bryce was speaking to fellow APHA members, which included Canadians. The APHA had been established in 1872 and allowed Canadians like Bryce to join, starting in 1884. Bryce served as APHA president in 1900 and led in the establishment of the Canadian Public Health Association in 1910.^[vii]

In the wake of the 1885 smallpox crisis, Quebec followed Ontario’s example and established its first permanent Provincial Board of Health in 1887. Other provinces and many U.S. states soon followed suit, based primarily on Ontario’s 1884 Public Health Act, drafted largely by Bryce. As he often pointed out in his many publications, the timing of the creation of the Ontario Board of Health was fortuitous. For example, as he wrote in a 1910 article, “It will be apparent that so far as Canada is concerned the fact that Ontario’s Board of Health was born in 1882, the very year which marked the real birth of Bacteriology, was a favourable augury for the development of whatever work the Board was able to accomplish in the future within the lines of science laid down for it.”^[viii] In 1882, Louis Pasteur first demonstrated the preventive power of an anthrax vaccine in sheep, and Robert Koch, also in 1882, discovered that tuberculosis, then responsible for the deaths of one out of every seven people in Europe and America, was caused by a bacterium. In 1876, Bryce’s 17-year-old sister was among TB’s victims. These scientific breakthroughs provided the foundation for the creation of Ontario’s Provincial Laboratory in 1890, with Bryce and the province again setting the example for the establishment of public health labs elsewhere in North America.^[ix]

* * *

Bryce was born on August 17, 1853, in Mount Pleasant, Ont., not far from the Six Nations Indian Reserve (today, the area is known as Six Nations of the Grand River).^[x] His father, George Bryce Sr., was a leader in the Presbyterian Church, while his older brother, George Jr., played a major role in building the public education system in Manitoba. George Jr. was also a “gentleman historian,” and in his popular book, A Short History of the Canadian People, took a broader approach to Canadian history, in contrast to the traditional style that focused on wars and treaties. In particular, he highlighted the contributions of various immigrant groups, as well as Indigenous peoples, to the nation’s history. The third chapter, “The Ancient Inhabitants of Canada,” is richly detailed over its 40 pages, surveying “The Mound Builders;” the present Indian tribes; domestic life; language, manners, and customs; and social, political, and religious organization. Indeed, George Jr.’s perspectives would anticipate many of the qualities for which his younger brother would become widely known.^[xi] Peter Bryce was thus raised with heavy doses of Protestant religion mixed with a classical liberal and pragmatic approach to life and education, and to relationships with different groups of people, including the Indigenous community and immigrants. 

Bryce was directed into a career in public health with the help of Dr. Edward Playter (1834-1909), a Toronto physician and prolific writer who single-handedly published Canada’s first professional public health journal between 1874 and 1892.^[xii] Through his journal and personal lobbying, Playter relentlessly pressed governments, especially the Ontario and federal governments, to implement the latest scientific advances in hygiene and infectious disease control. A major result of Playter’s lobbying efforts was the establishment of the Ontario Board of Health in 1882, and then Bryce’s appointment as its chief health officer. Initially the Provincial Board of Health’s role was strictly advisory to local boards of health, with no legal authority until the passage of the much stronger Public Health Act in 1884, of which Bryce was the principal author. Through his drive and expertise, Bryce led investigations into the causes of diseases and issued regulations to prevent their spread, secure sanitary conditions, and establish stricter quarantines. 

A serious smallpox outbreak in 1884 in Hungerford township in eastern Ontario gave Bryce and the Board its first opportunity to aggressively manage a serious infectious disease threat. Bryce enforced isolation and house-to-house smallpox vaccination, preventing the outbreak from spreading beyond the township.^[xiii] When a more severe smallpox epidemic emerged in the Montreal area in 1885, as noted, Bryce did not hesitate to employ a bold pre-emptive “invasion” strategy.

Beyond leading a much more aggressive public health response against outbreaks of infectious diseases, such as smallpox or diphtheria, Bryce pressed the provincial government and local municipalities to establish an active Board of Health in each locality along similar lines and funding levels as public boards of education. He also advocated for more formal public health education and training in medical schools, especially in chemistry and biology.^[xiv] His many publications while Ontario’s Chief Health Officer were often based on papers given at meetings of the American Public Health Association. In particular, he was concerned about the public water supply and the public health impact of deforestation, sewage and pollution on rivers and lakes. He also wrote about the safety of the milk supply and the threat posed by diseases among cows, such as anthrax and tuberculosis.^[xv] Fortunately, the new Ontario Provincial Laboratory enabled regular testing of milk and water supplies.

Top of mind for Bryce from the mid-1890s and into the first decade of the 20^th century was reducing the growing toll of tuberculosis.^[xvi] He often pointed to the need for greater funding from governments, particularly for sanatoria, public education, and the application of scientific knowledge about the causes of TB and the conditions that exacerbated it, e.g, poor ventilation in homes, schools, and factories. As Bryce emphasized in an 1897 article entitled, “The Place of the State in Dealing with Tuberculosis,” “the era of experimentation in dealing with tuberculosis has gone by.”^[xvii] It was clear that tuberculosis was both curable and preventable.

On January 22, 1904, Bryce shifted his public health focus from the provincial to the federal level when he was appointed Chief Medical Officer of the Department of the Interior and Indian Affairs. At the time, Canada was experiencing a growing wave of immigration, primarily from Europe, and directed mostly to the western provinces. Clifford Sifton, minister of the interior and superintendent general of Indian Affairs in the Liberal government of Wilfred Laurier, recognized the need for closer attention to and scrutiny of the health of the rapidly increasing numbers of immigrants. This required a larger federal capacity to oversee and coordinate immigration efforts, a key element of which would be medical inspections as immigrants arrived at ports of entry.^[xviii] Bryce’s qualifications and experience made him the obvious person to assume the new position of a federal Medical Officer. Bryce’s primary responsibility during his initial months in the federal government was organizing such medical inspection of immigrants as they arrived. Of particular importance, he provided medical and scientific evidence that supported Sifton’s controversial preference for immigrants originating from the more rural parts of southern and eastern Europe, rather than the urban centres of Britain and the United States. Bryce regarded the former as more self-sufficient and less vulnerable to economic hardship, mental illness, and the ravages of tuberculosis.^[xix] 

Concerns about tuberculosis, among other diseases, spreading from new immigrants to general and Indigenous
communities prompted the Superintendent of Indian Affairs to ask Bryce to investigate the health conditions of the several hundred Indigenous bands scattered across the country. In preparing for his investigation, Bryce was surprised to discover reports of very high rates of tuberculosis among children living in Indian residential schools. However, Department of Indian Affairs officials, according to an 1890 report, knew that TB levels in the schools could be reduced by half using well understood public health and sanitary measures, but the government ultimately rejected the suggestions as “too costly.” 

Bryce’s Annual Report for 1906 provided an overview of what appeared to be an Indigenous health crisis, with a mortality rate more than double that of the general Canadian population, and TB the most prevalent cause of death. Based on this initial overview, Bryce was asked to undertake personal inspections of 35 residential schools in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta during the spring of 1907 to provide the government with a better understanding of the potential threat of TB spreading from the Indigenous population.^[xx]

Bryce submitted his report in June, 1907, and it was distributed internally.^[xxi] The report broadened the findings of his previous annual reports, emphasizing clearly and coldly that it was “almost as if the prime conditions for the outbreak of epidemics had been deliberately created.”^[xxii] However, Bryce’s recommendations, based on his extensive knowledge of tuberculosis, were not published, and despite a leak to the press in November 1907 about the report, the public knew nothing about them. The leak resulted in a few newspaper articles, as well at least two brief news items in medical journals. However, as was acknowledged in a Saturday Night magazine article about the report, public attention was fleeting and apathy would quickly prevail.^[xxiii] One positive outcome of Bryce’s 1907 Report was reported in the Canada Lancet of June, 1908. “At a special meeting of the Six Nations Indian Council, when Dr. Bryce, a Dominion medical officer, was present, it was decided to erect a hospital for consumptives on the reserve, at a cost of $5,000, to be shared equally by the Government and the Council. Two large tents, costing $150 each, will be established for immediate wants.”^[xxiv] In referring to “consumptives,” the news item meant tuberculosis patients, and $5,000 in 1908 would be the equivalent of about $125,000 today.^[xxv]

In 1909, Bryce was then asked to investigate the health conditions of residential schools in the Calgary district. The Minister of the Interior, Frank Oliver, noted to Bryce, “As it is necessary that these residential schools should be filled with a healthy class of pupils in order that the expenditure on Indian education may not be rendered entirely nugatory, it seems desirable that you should go over the same ground as Dr. [J.D.] Lafferty and check his inspection.”^[xxvi] Bryce’s 1909 report yielded a similar set of recommendations, followed by a similar level of inaction on the part of the federal government. Duncan Campbell Scott, then a senior civil servant in the Department of Indian Affairs, actively opposed the implementation of any of Bryce’s recommendations. Scott also intervened to prevent Bryce’s reports on residential schools from being discussed at the 1910 annual meeting of the National Tuberculosis Association, of which Scott was then president. However, under pressure from Dr. George Adami, a McGill University pathologist who supported Bryce’s findings, Scott made the “distinct promise that the Department would take adequate action along the lines of the report,” although ultimately very little was done.^[xxvii]

In 1911, the appointment of a new Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, Dr. W.A. Roche, a physician, prompted Bryce to prepare a fresh summary of the Indigenous health crisis, emphasizing in December, 1912, that “this serious medical Indian problem [needs to] be taken up in earnest. It was stated that medical science now knows just what to do and what was necessary to put our knowledge into practice.”^[xxviii]

The 1913 appointment of Scott as deputy minister of Indian Affairs, followed by the outbreak of World War I, effectively stopped Bryce from undertaking further investigations of Indigenous health conditions. And as the war largely suspended immigration, Bryce found himself working on and writing about a variety of public health subjects, including rural cold storage, housing, rural depopulation, school medical inspection, and tuberculosis.^[xxix] In 1917, Bryce was also asked by the federal Conservation Commission to prepare a pamphlet, “The Conservation of the Man Power of Canada,” which “dealt with the broad problems of health which so vitally affect the man power of a nation”^[xxx] During the war Bryce also wrote some poetry^[xxxi] and a book, The Illumination of Joseph Keeler, Esq. or On, To The Land! published in 1915.^[xxxii] This work was an allegory on the artificiality of city life based on Bryce’s “deep study of the land problem as it affects our happiness, our imports and exports as well as the absorption of our immigrants.”^[xxxiii]

In early 1918, as the federal government was considering manpower issues for post-war Canada, the Conservation Commission asked Bryce to follow up his “The Conservation of the Man-Power of Canada” report with another, titled, “The Conservation of the Man-Power of the Indian Population of Canada,” which was not published.^[xxxiv] In preparing this report, Bryce asked the secretary of the Indian department, J.D. McLean, for the latest vital statistics, i.e., deaths by age and cause among the Indigenous population nationally. He was very surprised to be informed by McLean that beyond total numbers of births and deaths, the causes of deaths had never been collected. 

After more than a century of an organized Department of Indian Affairs in Canada, which began well before Confederation, the department employed some 287 medical officers. Bryce was thus shocked to realize that “due to the direct reactionary influence of the former Accountant and present Deputy Minister [Scott] no means exists, such as is looked upon as elementary in any Health Department today, by which the public or the Indians themselves can learn anything definite as to the actual vital conditions amongst these wards of the nation.”^[xxxv] At the same time, Bryce also reported that the City of Hamilton, with a population slightly exceeding the total Indigenous population of Canada, had since 1904 been able to reduce the death rate from tuberculosis by 75%. “If a similar method had been introduced amongst the bands on the health-giving uplands of Alberta, much might have been done to prevent such a splendid race of warriors as the Blackfeet from decreasing from 842 in 1904 to 726 in 1916, or, allowing for natural increase, an actual loss of 40 per cent, since they should have numbered at least 1,011.”^[xxxvi] 

As someone widely perceived to be a pre-eminent authority on public health in Canada and a principal architect of public health legislation in North America, Bryce was frustrated in 1919 when he was overlooked for the position of Canada’s first Deputy Minister of Health in the newly established federal Department of Health.^[xxxvii] Indeed, he had been asked to help draft the original bill defining a federal department of health, a key element of which was an “Indian Medical Service.” While the original legislation passed first reading in the House of Commons, the provision for the proposed service had been omitted before the second reading due to a lack of political support. The change seemed inexplicable to Bryce: “What special occult influences came into action may be imagined, when the Second Reading of the Bill took place with this clause regarding the Indian Medical Service omitted.” Scott very likely played a role in preventing a new federal Department of Health from assuming responsibility for Indigenous health. To Bryce, it seemed “hopeless to expect any improvement” in this area when a new Minister of Health was appointed. As Bryce later emphasized, the first Minister of Health, Newton W. Rowell, despite his progressive views on the rights of labour and women, “could with all the accumulated facts and statistics before him condemn to further indefinite suffering and neglect these Wards of the Canadian people, whom one Government after another had made treaties with and whom deputies and officials had sworn to assist and protect.”^[xxxvii] 

As a federal health official who swore to assist and protect the Indigenous population but had his expertise essentially ignored, Bryce felt the stings of dismissal very acutely. In his mind, there was clearly a stark and disturbing disconnection at play. The progressive medical and scientific world of public health and infectious disease prevention and control that had developed during the 1900-1920s period was disconnected from the world experienced by the Indigenous population. There was also an inability, and clear unwillingness, on the part of the federal government to apply the benefits of such medical and public health knowledge and experience towards the improvement of Indigenous health conditions, especially as it impacted children in residential schools. To Bryce, such a situation was unhealthy and destructive and amounted to a clear crime against Canada’s Indigenous population by the Canadian government. Once he had retired from his government position, Bryce felt strongly compelled to publicly expose these lethal contradictions by self-publishing an 18-page pamphlet in 1922, which he could not help but title, “The Story of a National Crime.”

[i] Canadian Journal of Medical Science, 7 (5) (May 1882). p. 172; https://www.canadiana.ca/view/oocihm.8_05186_77/29 
[ii] Peter H. Bryce, The Story of a National Crime: Being an Appeal for Justice to the Indians of Canada (Ottawa: James Hope & Sons, 1922), p. 14; https://archive.org/details/storyofnationalc00brycuoft/page/n6/mode/1up 
[iii] For more on Peter Bryce, see: Megan Sproule-Jones, “Crusading for the Forgotten: Dr. Peter Bryce, Public Health, and Prairie Native Residential Schools,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 13 (2) (Fall 1996): 199-224; https://www.utpjournals.press/doi/abs/10.3138/cbmh.13.2.199; Adam Green, “Telling 1922s Story of a National Crime: Canada’s First Chief Medical Officer and the Aborted Fight for Aboriginal Health Care,” Canadian Journal of Native Studies 26 (2) (2006): 211-28; https://www.proquest.com/docview/218101638. See also the documentary produced by Dr. Bryce’s great grandson, Andy Jay Bryce, “Finding Peter Bryce,” released in 2018, https://www.mcintyre.ca/titles/PCI000; https://andyjaybryce.com/ 
[iv] Peter H. Bryce, “Small-Pox in Canada, and the Methods of Dealing With it in the Different Provinces,” Public Health Papers and Reports 11 (1885), p 166; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2266210/ 
[v] Michel Bliss, Plague: A Story of Smallpox in Montreal (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1991).
[vi] Christopher J. Rutty and Susan Sullivan, This is Public Health: A Canadian History (Ottawa: Canadian Public Health Association, 2021, online book), https://www.cpha.ca/sites/default/files/assets/history/book/history-book-print_all_e.pdf 
[vii] Peter H. Bryce, “History of the American Public Health Association,” American Journal of Public Health 8 (5) (May 1918): 327-35; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1362184/ 
[viii] Peter H. Bryce, “History of Public Health in Canada,” The Canadian Therapeutist and Sanitary Engineer (Incorporating the Canadian Journal of Public Health) 1 (6) (June 1910), p. 290; https://www.jstor.org/stable/45245515 
[ix] Rutty and Sullivan, This is Public Health: A Canadian History, p. 1.12.
[x] Andy Jay Bryce, “Peter Bryce and the Six Nations Reserve,” https://andyjaybryce.com/2017/02/26/peter-bryce-and-the-six-nations-reserve/ 
[xi] George Bryce, A Short History of the Canadian People (London: 1887), https://archive.org/details/ashorthistoryca00brycgoog; Shannon Conway, “George Bryce and Anglo-Canadian Identity, 1880s to 1910s,” Manitoba History 86 (Spring 2018): 12-22.
[xii] Rutty and Sullivan, This is Public Health: A Canadian History, p. 1.4.
[xiii] Bryce, “Small-Pox in Canada, and the Methods of Dealing With it in the Different Provinces,” pp. 167-71.
[xiv] Peter H. Bryce, “Practical Difficulties of Medical Health Officers and Physicians in Dealing with Suspected Cases of Diphtheria,” Public Health Papers and Reports 20 (1894): 94-100, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19600629/ ; Peter H. Bryce, “Address on the expediency of the change from municipal to county medical health officers for promoting efficiency and economy in the public health service,” Provincial Board of Health, 1895, https://archive.org/details/cihm_01501.
[xv] Peter H. Bryce, “Underground Waters as Sources of Public Water-Supplies in Ontario,” Public Health Papers and Reports, 16 (1890): 209-26, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2266352/; Peter H. Bryce, “The Present Position of the Milk-Supply Problem From the Public Health Standpoint, and Some Practical Methods for Securing Safe Public Supplies,” Public Health Papers and Reports 17 (1891): 144-61, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2266392/; 
[xvi] Peter H. Bryce, “Report on Tuberculosis in Ontario,” Provincial Board of Health, 1894, https://archive.org/details/cihm_57912; Peter H. Bryce, “The Duty of the Public in Dealing with Tuberculosis,” 1898, https://archive.org/details/cihm_55427 
[xvii] Peter H. Bryce, “The Place of the State in Dealing with Tuberculosis,” Public Health Papers and Reports 23 (1897), p. 287, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19600772/ 
[xviii] Adam J. Green, “Humanitarian, M.D.: Dr. Peter H. Bryce’s Contributions to Canadian Federal Native and Immigration Policy, 1904-1921,” M.A. Thesis, Department of History, Queen’s University, 1999, p. 38,  https://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape9/PQDD_0007/MQ42624.pdf; Alan Sears, “Immigration Controls as Social Policy: The Case of Canadian Medical Inspection, 1900-1920,” Studies in Political Economy: A Socialist Review 33 (Autumn 1990): 91-112.
[xix] Peter H. Bryce, “Immigration in Relation to the Public Health,” The Canadian Journal of Medicine and Surgery 19 (4) (April 1906): 203-10, https://www.canadiana.ca/view/oocihm.8_05193_112/1; Bryce, The Story of a National Crime, p.3. 
[xx] “Canada’s Residential Schools: The History, Part 1. Origins to 1939,” The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Vol 1 (2015), pages 401-13, discusses “The Bryce Years, 1904-1914”; https://ehprnh2mwo3.exactdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Volume_1_History_Part_1_English_Web.pdf
[xxi] Peter H. Bryce, Report on the Indian Schools of Manitoba and the North-West Territories (Ottawa: Government Printing Bureau, 1907), https://archive.org/details/reportonindiansc00bryc; Bryce, The Story of a National Crime, pp. 3-4.
[xxii] Green, “Telling 1922s Story of a National Crime,” p. 216.
[xxiii] Kathleen McKenzie and Sean Carleton, “Hiding in Plain Sight: Newspaper Coverage of Dr. Peter Bryce’s 1907 Report on Residential Schools,” Active History, September 29, 2021, https://activehistory.ca/2021/09/hiding-in-plain-sight-newspaper-coverage-of-dr-peter-bryces-1907-report-on-residential-schools/; Bryce, The Story of a National Crime, p. 4; Saturday Night, Nov. 23, 1907; Dominion Medical Monthly 29 (6) (Dec 1907), p. 281; “Civic Health Matters, The Western Canada Medical Journal 1 (12) (Dec. 1907), p. 531.
[xxiv] “Personal and News Items,” The Canada Lancet 41 (10) (June 1908), p. 788, https://www.canadiana.ca/view/oocihm.8_05199_454/52
[xxv] https://www.bankofcanada.ca/rates/related/inflation-calculator/
[xxvi] Bryce, The Story of a National Crime, p. 5. Dr. James Delamere Lafferty was a physician and leader in the establishment of the medical profession in Alberta. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Delamere_Lafferty 
[xxvii] Bryce, The Story of a National Crime, pp. 5-6.
[xxviii] Ibid., p. 7
[xxix] Peter H. Bryce, “Rural Cold Storages, a Scientific and Economic Necessity,” Public Health Journal 5 (4) (April 1914): 228-42; Peter H. Bryce and A.D. Watson, “The Land Problem in Relation to Housing,” Public Health Journal 6 (12) (Dec. 1915): 608-13; Peter H. Bryce, “Effects Upon Public Health and Natural Prosperity from Rural Depopulation and Abnormal Increase of Cities,” American Journal of Public Health 5 (1) (Jan. 1915): 48-56; Peter H. Bryce, “The Work of Bureaus of Child Hygiene and of Medical Inspection in Schools,” Public Health Journal 7 (2) (Feb. 1916): 59-62; Peter H. Bryce, “Tuberculosis in Relation to Feeblemindedness,” Public Health Journal 7 (8) (July 1916): 365-70; Peter H. Bryce, “Principles Involved in Notification of Tuberculosis,” Public Health Journal 8 (1) (Jan. 1917): 1-5.
[xxx] Peter H. Bryce, Conservation of Man-power in Canada: A National Need, Commission of Conservation Canada (Ottawa: 1918), https://archive.org/details/cihm_82015; Bryce, The Story of a National Crime, p. 8.
[xxxi]  Peter H. Bryce, “Thy Hour, O Canada, Has Struck!” Public Health Journal 7 (4) (April 1916).
[xxxii] Peter H. Bryce, The Illumination of Joseph Keeler, Esq. or On, To The Land (Boston: American Journal of Public Health, 1915), https://archive.org/details/illuminationofjo00bryc/mode/1up 
[xxxiii] Book Reviews, “The Illumination of Joseph Keeler, Esq.,” Public Health Journal 6 (11) (Nov. 1915): 567.
[xxxiv] Bryce, The Story of a National Crime, p. 8.
[xxxv]  Ibid., p. 10.
[xxxvi] Ibid., p. 11.
[xxxvii] Peter H. Bryce, “Scope of a Federal Health Department,” American Journal of Public Health 9 (9) (Jan. 1919): 650-53, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18010164/; Peter H. Bryce, “The Scope of a Federal Department of Health,” The Canadian Medical Association Journal 10 (1) (Jan. 1920): 1-10, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1523841/
[xxxviii] Bryce, The Story of a National Crime, p. 12.