Tim Cook's 'Lifesavers and Body Snatchers' - A Review by George Eliot

Tim Cook, Canada’s most prolific war historian, and I both did our undergraduate studies in History at Trent University in Peterborough, Canada.  I was interested in reviewing his book Lifesavers and Body Snatchers: Medical Care and the Struggle for Survival in the Great War (Penguin, 2022).  Unfortunately, he was overtaken by death in the meantime at age 54.  So, I chose otherwise.  Here, from my readings of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872), is, in my view, the most conceivably light-footed manner for replying to Cook’s work:

“I am thinking of a great fellow, who was about as old as I am three hundred years ago, and had already begun a new era in anatomy.”

“I can’t guess,” said Rosamond, shaking her head. “We used to play at guessing historical characters at Mrs. Lemon’s, but not anatomists.”

“I’ll tell you. His name was Vesalius. And the only way he could get to know anatomy as he did, was by going to snatch bodies at night, from graveyards and places of execution.”

“Oh!” said Rosamond, with a look of disgust on her pretty face, “I am very glad you are not Vesalius. I should have thought he might find some less horrible way than that.”

“No, he couldn’t,” said Lydgate, going on too earnestly to take much notice of her answer. “He could only get a complete skeleton by snatching the whitened bones of a criminal from the gallows, and burying them, and fetching them away by bits secretly, in the dead of night.”

“I hope he is not one of your great heroes,” said Rosamond, half playfully, half anxiously, “else I shall have you getting up in the night to go to St. Peter’s churchyard. You know how angry you told me the people were about Mrs. Goby. You have enemies enough already.”

“So had Vesalius, Rosy. No wonder the medical fogies in Middlemarch are jealous, when some of the greatest doctors living were fierce upon Vesalius because they had believed in Galen, and he showed that Galen was wrong. They called him a liar and a poisonous monster. But the facts of the human frame were on his side; and so he got the better of them.”

“And what happened to him afterwards?” said Rosamond, with some interest.

“Oh, he had a good deal of fighting to the last. And they did exasperate him enough at one time to make him burn a good deal of his work. Then he got shipwrecked just as he was coming from Jerusalem to take a great chair at Padua. He died rather miserably.”

Source:  Middlemarch  Project Gutenberg eBook  Release date: July 1, 1994 [eBook #145] Most recently updated: April 12, 2026.  See Chapter 45.

On Company Towns in Canada, Robert Owen, and a Clubhouse

                                                 
Ioco Townsite, British Columbia, 1940's (h/t Port Moody Station Museum) 

What do Kitimat, Powell River, Fort McMurray, Flin Flon, Ioco and New View Society (in Port Coquitlam, B.C.) have in common?  All but one are Company Towns in Canada, and all of them share an intellectual debt to Robert Owen (1771-1858).

Robert Owen was a social reformer; a Utopian Socialist, in fact.  He was a successful cotton manufacturer who took it upon himself to manufacture “men of virtue”.[1]   He began with his model cotton mills he came to own in New Lanark, Scotland, and then carried it to New Harmony, Indiana, where his plans ended in failure.  Throughout, however, he believed that the environment shaped and formed each individual’s character, which meant that education was essential to improving lives.

Following along the lines of Rousseau, Owen believed that man was naturally good.  When he took over New Lanark, conditions were poor – housing and sanitation were sorely neglected. “Within a few years, Owen had turned this dirty little village into one of the wonders of Europe, a place of pilgrimage for English earls and Russian grand dukes.  And the company paid better dividends than ever.  Owen began by sanitary reform.  He provided for the orderly disposal of waste, and forbade household refuse pits in front of the cottages.  He built new houses, and eventually gave each family several rooms.”[2]

From this, Owen developed his ideal for a model community.  “…. a new village will be built. The buildings will be constructed around a central parallelogram devoted to lawns and gardens.  They will include living-quarters with common kitchens, dining rooms, and recreation-rooms, but providing separate apartments for each family.  A school, a community hall, and other necessary public buildings will complete the parallelogram.  Barns and workshops will be built a little apart.”[3]

As I see it, Owen’s New Lanark was the model for the Ioco Townsite and many other company towns.  When the Imperial Oil Company established the beginnings of the oil refinery on the North Shore of Port Moody, B.C. in 1914, the shanty town that quickly developed needed attention.  As local historian and long-term Mayor of Belcarra, Ralph Drew put it: “The construction of the ‘Ioco Townsite’ complete with playgrounds, bowling greens, tennis courts and sports fields became a ‘jewel of Vancouver’s suburbs’  Almost every aspect of worker’s social life – dances, sports, and more casual socializing – occurred within the purview of the ‘company town.’” [4]

But Owen’s effect does not end with the company town.  His ideas in A New View of Society (1813-1816), are clearly the inspiration behind the New View Society, a mental health clubhouse in Port Coquitlam, founded in 1973  in the wake of Riverview Hospital downsizing.  Spanning the Tri-Cities, and far beyond, Robert Owen’s legacy lives on.

---

[1] Crane Brinton, English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (London: Ernest Benn, 1933), p. 44.

[2] Ibid., p, 52.

[3] Ibid., pp. 54,55.

[4] Ralph Drew, Townsite Tales: The History of Ioco, Anmore Valley & North Shore of Port Moody Arm (Belcarra, B.C.: Ralph Drew, 2017), p. 319.   See also: Lucie K. Morisset and Jessica Mace, Identity on the Land: Company Towns in Canada (Montreal: Patrimonium, 2019).

Has the method for killing people improved? Or, War as a catalyst for technological change

 
A Ukrainian Abrams Tank with added anti-drone metal protection.

h/t Howard Altman

The Canadian Rainbow: The case as stated in 1865

I propose the adaptation of the rainbow as our emblem.  By the endless variety of its tint the rainbow will give an excellent idea of the diversity of races, religions, sentiments and interests of the different parts of the Confederation.  By its slender and elongated form the rainbow would afford a perfect representation of the geographical configuration of the Confederation.  By its lack of consistence – an image without substance – the rainbow would represent aptly the solidity of our Confederation.  An emblem we must have, for every great empire has one; let us adopt the rainbow.

Henri Joly de Lotbinière, in the debates in the legislative assembly of Canada on the proposed scheme of a British North America, Quebec, 20 February, 1865.

Source: See the Epigraph in Frank H. Underhill, In Search of Canadian Liberalism (Toronto: Macmillan Co. of Canada, 1960)[reprinted 1975].

A Nursery Rhyme for Today

 
 Source: Edward Miller, 3 Tales Retold and Illustrated:
 The Three Little Pigs, Goldilocks and the Three Bears. 
 Three Billy Goats Gruff (New York: Henry Holt & Co,
 2007).

William James and the Moral Equivalent of War, or: The Demotion of Reason

These words are of course literally true.  The immediate aim of the soldier’s life is, as Moltke said, destruction, and nothing but destruction; and whatever constructions wars result in are remote and non-military.  Consequently the soldier cannot train himself to be too feelingless to all those usual sympathies and respects, whether for persons or for things, that make for conservation.  Yet the fact remains that war is a school of strenuous life and heroism; and, being in the line of aboriginal instinct, is the only school that as yet is universally available.  But when we gravely ask ourselves whether this wholesale organization of irrationality and crime be our only bulwark against effeminacy, we stand aghast at the thought, and think more kindly of ascetic religion.  One hears of the mechanical equivalent of heat.  What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war: something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible.  I have often thought that in the old monkish poverty-worship, in spite of the pedantry which infested it, there might be something like that moral equivalent of war which we are seeking.  May not voluntarily accepted poverty be ‘the strenuous life,’ without the need of crushing weaker peoples?[1]

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

---

[1] William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, ed. Martin E. Marty (London: Penguin, 1982), p. 367.

Cash is King ...

 
     h/t David Parkins/The Globe and Mail
     Published March 31, 2026