ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the historical development of the medical profession in Canada as a national case study. Conceptual difficulties regarding the changing role of medicine involve the similarities and differences amongst medical dominance, professionalization and proletarianization. While the professionalization literature has been attacked from all sides, Marxist writers on medicine have claimed that medicine could only be adequately analyzed by situating it within the larger social formation. Medicine was viewed as the intermediate rather than ultimate controller of health care events. The emergence of medical dominance in Canada took place between the early nineteenth century, when medicine lacked power and status, and the early twentieth century, by which time it largely controlled the emerging health means of production. After mid-century the major challenge to medicine came from the homeopaths and eclectics, who had spread to Canada from the United States and gained a considerable popular following.
