To look at he history of gender and health in Canada we must go far back into history to see what has happened to make health the way it is today. Firstly we must look into the Public Health Act. Only men, in specific five male doctors, where a part of the Public Health Act in British Colombia when the act was proclaimed in 1895. It felt as if men were the ones that got to determine what healthy was in a person. And because of racism being such a dominate force in society back then, they tend to brush of the people of different cultures for being the reason the white people are getting ill. They blamed their illness on the fact they were dirty, and when the whites started to become sick themselves they then needed someone to blame. They wouldn’t think to look into their habits and see if maybe something they were doing was causing them to fall sick.“Race was an integral part of the discourse on public health from its earliest days. For those at whom such rhetoric was aimed, particularly non-whites, the stakes could be very high: hefty fines, court appearances, evictions under city health by-laws, and routinely penalized contravention of specific notions of filth and sickness” (Gleason, 288). The neglect of First Nations people had continued into the 1920’s and even further. There was a major outbreak in the diseases children would get from being at school in 1893. It’s very interesting to think that white people were getting away with carrying these infections and illnesses and no one thought anything of it. They were trying to figure out what was wrong and how they could help these people. Yet people from other races had been struggling for ages to try and get medicine to get better yet whites didn’t care enough and just called the “filthy” and “dirty” people. 1872 schools began to promote healthy living through “cleanliness, neatness and decency… to personally inspect the children every morning to that they have their hands and faces washed, their hair combed, and clothes clean. Children were now taught the basics of keeping themselves and their living areas clean so that they would not become sick. Yet not all children would be able to get these clean facilities as many children were still living and studying in the horrendous conditions of a poorly lit, no running water, horribly ventilated classroom. Both Rutherdale and Gleason aim to show how hygiene and classroom teaching became a tradition that was taught down and saved the lives of many. Yet Rutherdale goes more in depth about the issues that Aboriginal people went through with the colonization of northern America. “Western sleeping habits, hygiene, clothing, and medical care were solutions offered in a broad campaign to reconstruct northern bodies” (Rutherdale, 305). Aboriginal children were molded into the typical southern human. They were taught how to do certain things that went against their own beliefs but forces to follow the beliefs of others. “Aboriginal women lost their sense of empowerment through the erosion of their control over childbirth” (Rutherdale, 306). It is sad to think that many of the aboriginal children had not even had a bath in their lifetime. Reading the stories of how many of these children had not had baths until they were working for wealthy people is unheard of. In modern society children have baths as young as days old, yet these children would be six, seven, even eight years old before ever having their first bath. Some not even getting to experience having one at all. In Dorothy Knight’s story about wanting to bath a little girl who was suffering from scabies and impetigo, the little girl is frighten from the seemingly simple bath. Yet for some that have never had to experience this before it could be very traumatizing. “Dorothy Knight stopped and questioned herself. “What am I trying to do,” she wondered. What was her goal? How could she expect that all of the Inuit children would suddenly be able to conform to her standards of cleanliness, when they did not have access to bathtubs?” (Rutherdale, 316) The history of human health has had a major impact on the Aboriginal people that lived on the land long before settlers came on it. Not only did they take land but they implemented beauty and heath standards of their own to the people that had been living fine before they came along; and the Aboriginal children were the easiest target to try and conform.