National Network for Equitable Library Service

There are many books directed at those who are retired or about to retire, and most of them focus on financial matters, food and nutrition, or the best place to settle down. Most fitness books are written for the serious fitness enthusiast, not your average Canadian annuitant. This is a book with a different goal. Get Up and Go motivates those 50 and over to become more physically fit and mentally active. Why? So they can live longer, stay healthy, feel good, and enjoy life.

From Pioneer Public Health Nurse to Advocate for the Aged: Eunice Henrietta Dyke. A dynamic personality whose determination improved public health care and nurses’ education, and began the recognition of senior citizens’ needs; yet she was fired at the height of her nursing career. A woman described as "ahead of her time."

This is the story of Rene M. Caisse of Bracebridge, Canada and describes her extraordinary perseverance to obtain official recognition of her herbal cancer remedy she called Essiac, her name spelled backwards. Rene Caisse was thrust into a life-long medical-legal-political controversy that still persists since her death in 1978. Rene wrestled with the Hepburn government of Ontario over the operation of her Bracebridge cancer clinic during 1935 to 1941 and her use of Essiac. She refused to reveal her secret formula and legislation demanding the recipe forced the closing of her clinic.

Ask the Grey Sisters: Sault Ste. Marie and the General Hospital, 1898-1998 tells the story of the creation and one-hundred-year history of the Sault Ste. Marie General Hospital. At a time when Canada's healthcare system is at a crossroads and we are asked to make crucial decisions for its future, it is intriguing and enlightening to look at the colourful past of a typical community hospital. Throughout the 1890s, Sault Ste. Marie was a town in search of a hospital.

For more than a century, Toronto’s Health Department has served as a model of evolving municipal public health services in Canada and beyond. From horse manure to hippies and small pox to AIDS, the Department’s staff have established and maintained standards of environmental cleanliness and communicable disease control procedures that have made the city a healthy place to live. This centennial history anlyzes the complex interaction of politics, patronage and professional aspirations which determine the success or failure of specific policies and programs.

Canadian surgeon Lucille Teasdale and her husband founded Lacor Hospital in northern Uganda in 1961. For 35 years the two doctors treated such contagious diseases as malaria, TB, and AIDS, and Teasdale performed thousands of operations under difficult conditions. They lived through civil war, hostage takings, and epidemics. Teasdale received the highest humanitarian awards from the U.N. for her lifes work in Africa.

Through the inspirational, wise, and informative stories of the residents, either in their own words or based on interviews, and environmental photographs of each, this book focuses on various residents of long-term care facilities and especially on the positive facets of their life, their thoughts, and their feelings. The only issue that reaches the media about nursing homes is the negative and unfortunate events that sometimes occur, but there is so much more to the story.

Clickety Clack is Joy McDiarmid’s self- portrait of bipolar mental illness and one of the most ambiguous sexual identities imaginable for a woman coming of age in the 1950s. Amidst gender and sexuality confusion, this Winnipeg woman began to look for romantic love and sexual fulfillment: sometimes wanting to dress as a man, sometimes as a woman, sometimes attracted to men, sometimes to women.

Originally published in the early 1950s, The Scalpel, the Sword celebrates the turbulent career of Dr. Norman Bethune (1890-1939), a brilliant surgeon, campaigner against private medicine, communist, and graphic artist. Bethune belonged to that international contingent of individuals who recognized the threat of fascism in the world and went out courageously to try to defeat it.

Smoking doesn’t have to leave you at a dead end. This unique book provides insight, whether you are a current or past smoker, on how to reduce your risk for heart attack and stroke before it’s too late. Rather than asking you to quit smoking, Dr. Fenske instead asks you to make changes in your life while you quit, by focusing on how the cardiovascular system is susceptible to disease, and how its healthy function can be optimized independent of smoking. Humorous and informative, While You Quit asks you to take a series of small, intentional steps toward vascular health.