The Proving Ground: Colombo Plan Fellowships and the Changing Landscape of Health Education in Canada, 1951–69
Publication: Canadian Bulletin of Medical History
Volume 38, Number 1
Abstract
Abstract
This article examines the history of the Colombo Plan fellowship program in Canada during the 1950s and 1960s. It will argue that this program had a visible impact on Canadian institutions of learning and health care for three reasons. First, it brought an unprecedented number of students and health care professionals from South and Southeast Asia to Canada; second, it fostered a sense of mission within Canadian institutions about the role education should play in contributing to health and international development overseas; and third, it revealed the challenges and tensions inherent in fulfilling this mission in the context of differences between the objectives of Canadian officials and those of the fellows themselves. With its focus on South and Southeast Asia, the Colombo Plan fellowship program anticipated broader trends regarding the international migration of health workers from that region in later years.
Résumé
Cet article examine l’histoire du programme de bourses du Plan de Colombo au Canada pendant les années 1950 et 1960. Il fait valoir que ce programme a eu un impact très net sur les établissements d’enseignement et de soins de santé canadiens. Premièrement, il a permis d’attirer au Canada un nombre sans précédent d’étudiants et de professionnels de la santé d’Asie du Sud et du Sud-Est. Deuxièmement, il a conféré aux institutions canadiennes le sentiment d’avoir une mission à accomplir et les a convaincues que l’éducation devait jouer un rôle en matière de santé et de développement international. Troisièmement, il a révélé les tensions et les défis inhérents à cette mission étant donné les objectifs différents visés par les responsables canadiens et par les boursiers. En se concentrant sur l’Asie du Sud et du Sud-Est, le programme de bourses du Plan de Colombo a néanmoins anticipé des évolutions importantes comme la migration internationale des travailleurs de la santé provenant de cette région qui prendra plus d’ampleur par la suite.
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Notes
1.
“Graduate Nurses from Asia,” Library and Archives Canada [LAC], Online MIKAN no. 4365900, Item 2640, Acc. 1972-047 NPC, Box 06274.1. Though undated, the photo was taken sometime between 1959 and 1961, as a search of the LAC collection has revealed that one of the nurses named, Miss Loan Hoa Tjoe, was in Canada with the Economic and Technical Assistance Branch (i.e., the Colombo Plan) during this time.
2.
After the creation of the Canadian International Development Agency in 1968, the Colombo Plan became less important to the overall Canadian aid program. LAC files indicate that fellows continued to come to Canada specifically under the Colombo Plan program into the early 1970s, but at much lower numbers than in the previous two decades.
3.
I do not have complete numbers on how many fellows came to Canada from South and Southeast Asia during this period through the WHO program as compared to the Colombo Plan. The data that I do have indicates that the Colombo Plan was significantly larger in terms of total numbers of fellows coming to Canada than the WHO fellowship program, both in total and specifically in terms of those coming from South and Southeast Asia (see Table 1). Fellows from South and Southeast Asia made up much smaller percentages of the total number of WHO fellows, in opposition to the Colombo Plan, where most students arrived from South and Southeast Asia. An uncertain percentage of this smaller total would have been spread over many countries, including Canada. Therefore, it stands to reason that the WHO fellowship program brought in many fewer students than the Colombo Plan.
4.
The Colombo Plan for Co-operative Economic Development in South and South-East Asia, Seventeenth Annual Report of the Consultative Committee, Vancouver, British Columbia, October 1969 (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer for Canada, 1970), 423–24.
5.
David Wright, Sasha Mullally, and Mary Colleen Cordukes, “‘Worse than Being Married’: The Exodus of British Doctors from the National Health Service to Canada, c. 1955–75,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 65, no. 4 (2010): 546–75, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jrq013; Sasha Mullally and David Wright, “La Grande Séduction? The Immigration of Foreign-Trained Physicians to Canada, c. 1954–76,” Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études canadiennes 41, no. 3 (2007): 67–89; and Sasha Mullally and David Wright, “Connecting to Canada: Experiences of the South Asian Medical Diaspora during the 1960s and 1970s,” in Laurence Monnais and David Wright, eds., Doctors beyond Borders: The Transnational Migration of Physicians in the Twentieth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 230–56.
6.
Margaret Shkimba and Karen Flynn, “‘In England We Did Nursing’: Caribbean and British Nurses in Great Britain and Canada, 1950–70,” in Barbara Mortimer and Susan McGann, eds., New Directions in the History of Nursing: International Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2005), 141–57.
7.
Mullally and Wright, “Connecting to Canada,” 236.
8.
See Ted Cogan, “Building a Base: The Growth of Public Engagement with Canadian Foreign Aid Policy, 1950–1980,” in Greg Donaghy and David Webster, eds., A Samaritan State Revisited: Historical Perspectives on Canadian Foreign Aid (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2019), 191–221.
9.
David C. Engerman, “Development Politics and the Cold War,” Diplomatic History 41, no. 1 (2017): 1–19, https://doi.org/10.1093/dh/dhw043.
10.
Marianne P. Fedunkiw, Rockefeller Foundation Funding and Medical Education in Toronto, Montreal, and Halifax (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005); Paul A. Bator, with A.J. Rhodes, Within Reach of Everyone: A History of the University of Toronto School of Hygiene and the Connaught Laboratories, vol. 1, 1927 to 1955 (Ottawa: Canadian Public Health Association, 1990); and Paul A. Bator, Within Reach of Everyone: A History of the University of Toronto School of Hygiene and Connaught Laboratories Limited, vol. 2, 1955 to 1975 (Ottawa: Canadian Public Health Association, 1995).
11.
Pierre Yves-Saunier, “Wedges and Webs: Rockefeller Nursing Fellowships (1920–40),” in Ludovic Tournès and Giles Scott-Smith, eds., Global Exchanges: Scholarships and Transnational Circulations in the Modern World (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018), 127–39, 136.
12.
For example, in 1952 the bishop of Amritsar, a Canadian, noted in a letter to supporters that the Anglican mission in the Punjab was fundraising for a young woman doctor to complete further education in Edinburgh. C. R. H. Wilkinson to “Friends and Supporters,” October 1952, Diocesan Archives, Anglican Church of Canada [DA], MSCC Series 3-3, Box 83, File Amritsar Diocese 1950–59. This effort was apparently successful, since later in 1954 he noted that she was only one of 28 out of 168 students to pass her primary examinations in Edinburgh. Heber Amritsar to “Friends,” November 1954, DA, MSCC Series 3-3, Box 83, File Amritsar Diocese 1950–59. Ruth Compton Brouwer also interviewed a mission-sponsored doctor who had come to Canada from Korea to receive further education in 1948 for her book Modern Women Modernizing Men: The Changing Missions of Three Professional Women in Asia and Africa, 1902–69 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press), x.
13.
Ludovic Tournès and Giles Scott-Smith, “A World of Exchanges: Conceptualizing the History of International Scholarship Programs (Nineteenth to Twenty-First Centuries),” in Tournès and Scott-Smith, Global Exchanges, 1–29, 15.
14.
Engerman, “Development Politics.”
15.
Liping Bu, “Educational Exchange and Cultural Diplomacy in the Cold War,” Journal of American Studies 33, no. 3 (1999): 393–415, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875899006167; and Andreas Åkerlund, “The Impact of Foreign Policy on Educational Exchange: The Swedish State Scholarship Programme, 1938–1990,” Paedagogica Historica 50, no. 3 (2014): 390–409, https://doi.org/10.1080/00309230.2014.884609.
16.
The Colombo Plan for Co-operative Economic Development in South and South-East Asia, Progress Report by the Consultative Committee (New Delhi: n.p., 1953), 3.
17.
Katsuhiko Yokoi has examined the role of the Colombo Plan in supporting the Indian Institutes of Technology. Katsuhiko Yokoi, “The Colombo Plan and Industrialization in India: Technical Cooperation for the Indian Institutes of Technology,” in Shigeru Akita, Gerold Krozewski, and Shoichi Watanabe, eds., The Transformation of the International Order of Asia: Decolonization, the Cold War, and the Colombo Plan (London: Routledge, 2015), 50–71.
18.
For more, see Jill Campbell-Miller, “Encounter and Apprenticeship: The Colombo Plan and Canadian Aid in India, 1950–60,” in Donaghy and Webster, A Samaritan State Revisited, 27–52.
19.
Shigeru Akita, “The Transformation of the Colombo Plan and the Sterling Area in the Late 1950s and Early 1960s,” in Akita, Krozewski, and Watanabe, The Transformation of the International Order of Asia, 111–30, 111–14.
20.
In 1962–63, it was slightly less than 4% of the total Colombo Plan appropriation, and though numbers are not available for every year, this was a typical appropriation. The Tenth Annual Report of the Consultative Committee of the Colombo Plan for Co-operative Economic Development in South and South-East Asia. Commemorative Issue to Mark the Tenth Anniversary of the Colombo Plan (Kuala Lumpur: Printed at the Government Press by Thor Beng Chong, Acting Government Printer, Federation of Malaya, 1962), 56.
21.
As David Webster writes, “Technical assistance was buoyed up on a wave of postwar optimism that Western ‘know-how’ – and its hands-on counterpart, ‘show-how’ – could build a better world.” David Webster, “Development Advisors in a Time of Cold War and Decolonization: The United Nations Technical Assistance Administration, 1950–59,” Journal of Global History 6, no. 2 (2011): 249–72, 251, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022811000258.
22.
The Colombo Plan for Co-operative Economic Development in South and South-East Asia, Fourth Annual Report of the Consultative Committee (Singapore: Colombo Plan Bureau, 1955), 43; and Progress of the Colombo Plan 1963 (Colombo Plan Bureau, n.d.), 56.
23.
Seventeenth Annual Report, 424.
24.
“Technical Cooperation Service – Estimate of Future Commitments, 1 April 1954 – Summary,” LAC, RG 29, Vol. 1007, File 303-2-3.
25.
For example, in 1953, the job description for a nursing instructor in Ceylon set the salary at $5,000 per annum, plus expenses. Of the three women nominated for the position, all earned $4,000 or less in their Canadian jobs, meaning that the overseas job actually represented a substantial raise. Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs to Office of the High Commission for Canada, Colombo Annex 4 – Possible Supplement to the Fee of Miss Eleanor Martin, 5 February 1954; Personal History Files for Eleanor Martin, Elva Winnifred, and Catherine Galway, LAC, RG 25, Vol. 8392, File 11038-A-1-AZ-40, Part 1.
26.
D.W. Bartlett to B.D.B. Layton, 15 November 1957, LAC, RG 29, Vol. 1007, File 303-2-1.
27.
An attempt to analyze Canadian university yearbooks proved to be a dead end, since most fellows came to study in diploma and postgraduate programs, which are often not well represented in yearbooks. Also, this was an era of a great deal of change in higher education, meaning that some programs did not remain consistent over the duration of the period under study (as a result of the introduction of the four-year bachelor of science in nursing, for example).
28.
Tenth Annual Report, 216.
29.
These figures were reached as follows: 6,801 total fellows × 13% = 884; or, 6,801 total fellows × 16% = 1,088.
30.
By the 1954–55 fiscal year, as noted above, Canada had committed $285,000 to sending experts abroad, and $207,730 to bringing trainees to Canada. “Technical Cooperation Service – Estimate of Future Commitments.”
31.
During the first nine years of the program, the Department of Trade and Commerce administered Colombo Plan programs. D.W. Bartlett, memorandum for R.H. Jay, 22 June 1954, LAC, RG 29, Vol. 1007, File 303-2-1.
32.
J.A. MacDonald, memorandum for N.E. Currie, 24 February 1953, 24 February 1953, LAC, RG 25, Vol. 8392, File 11038-A-1-AN-40, Part 1.
33.
A.E. Ritchie, memorandum to members of the IGTA, attachment: “Minutes of the IGTA Meeting, 10 October 1956,” 16 October 1956, LAC, RG 29, Vol. 1007, File 303-2-5.
34.
Report of the Health Survey and Development Committee (Delhi: Government of India Press, 1946), 1:1, https://www.nhp.gov.in/bhore-committee-1946_pg.
35.
The statistics for New Zealand were from 1931. Report of the Health Survey and Development Committee, 8.
36.
Report of the Health Survey and Development Committee, 13.
37.
Government of India Planning Commission, First Five Year Plan (Delhi: Publications Division, Government of India, 1953), 208.
38.
D.L. Thomson to Professor D.K. Kevan, 17 February 1960, McGill Archives, RG 36, C. 107 1260 C, File Colombo Plan 1959–60.
39.
Olivier Leroux to Ted Giles, 9 September 1954, LAC, RG 29, Vol. 1007, File 303-2-1.
40.
D.W. Bartlett, memorandum for R. H. Jay, 22 June 1954, LAC, RG 29, Vol. 1007, File 303-2-1.
41.
Report of the Committee on Postgraduate Studies, Minute Book, Sessions 1951–52, 1952–53, 1953–54, University of Toronto Archives and Records Management Services [UTARMS], Faculty of Medicine, A86-0027, Box 25, 172.
42.
L.B. Pett to G.D.W. Cameron, 20 February 1952, LAC, RG 29, Vol. 1007, File 303-2-1.
43.
Escott Reid to the Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs, 11 May 1954, LAC, RG 29, Vol. 1007, File 303-2-1.
44.
B.D.B. Layton to E. Ritchie, 29 May 1956, LAC, RG 29, Vol. 1008, File C-303-2-10A.
45.
Madelaine Healey, A History of Nursing and the State: 1907–2007 (London: Routledge, 2013), 145.
46.
T.G. Giles to A. Moore, attachment, “Summary of Views of the Medical Panel Concerning Undergraduate Training in Medicine,” 28 April 1958, LAC, RG 29, Vol. 1008, File C-303-2-10A.
47.
Minutes of the Annual Meeting of the Scholarship Advisory Panel, 1 April 1958, McGill Archives, RG 36, C. 107 1260 C, File Colombo Plan 1957–58.
48.
Dr. P.C. Dube to Professor John D. Hamilton, 18 June 1965, UTARMS, Faculty of Medicine, A1976-0044, Box 182, File External Aid Office.
49.
G.D.W. Cameron to J.A. MacFarlane, 18 June 1953, LAC, RG 25, Vol. 8392, File 11038-A-2-AR-40, Part 1.
50.
J.A. MacDonald to Neill E. Currie, 10 July 1953, LAC, RG 25, Vol. 8392, File 11038-A-1-AZ-40, Part 1.
51.
The Philippines and Vietnam had similar colonial contexts, though they were not initially part of the Colombo Plan and so would not have received these first requests. Catherine Ceniza Choy, Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 20–57; and Laurence Monnais-Rousselot, Médicine et colonisation. L’aventure indochinoise, 1860–1939 (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 1999), 224–314.
52.
Bator, Within Reach of Everyone, 1:118.
53.
“Technical Cooperation Service – Estimate of Future Commitments”; and B.D.B. Layton to Anne Moore, attachment, “Report of Medical Panel re Medical Training Fellowships,” 16 April 1962, LAC, RG 29, Vol. 1008, File C-303-2-11, Part 2.
54.
“McGill First: Two Males among 161 Graduate Nurses,” The Gazette (Montreal), 6 October 1960, 3.
55.
Seventeenth Annual Report, 424.
56.
B.D.B. Layton to D.W. Bartlett, 9 July 1958, LAC, RG 29, Vol. 1008, File 303-2-10A.
57.
It should be noted that I did not consult all the assessments over the two decades under discussion, but saw a sporadic number contained in a selection of files in various archives.
58.
“Re: Colombo Plan Students,” memorandum to T.J. Giles, 27 October 1953, LAC, RG 29, Vol. 1007, File 303-2-1.
59.
Scholarship report, Ashfaq Ahmad Khan, February 1962, LAC, RG 29, Vol. 1008, File C-303-2-11, Part 2.
60.
J.T. Hobart to T.J. Giles, 20 July 1956, LAC, RG 29, Vol. 1008, File 303-2-10A.
61.
Scholarship report, M.S.S. Maskoeb, February 1962, LAC, RG 29, Vol. 1008, File C-303-2-11, Part 2.
62.
Scholarship report, M.S.S. Maskoeb.
63.
Scholarship report, Ratana Kamboonruang, 14 February 1962, LAC, RG 29, Vol. 1008, File 303-2-11, Part 2.
64.
“Meeting of Scholarship Advisory Panel (June 29, 1961),” Regular Meeting of the Scholarship Advisory Panel, 5 April 1961, LAC, RG 29, Vol. 1008, File 303-2-11, Part 2.
65.
Scholarship report, Pachongsook Dhattusuan, January 1962, LAC, RG 29, Vol. 1008, File 303-2-11, Part 2.
66.
LAC denied a formal Access to Information and Privacy request on such files, though this is understandable given that they likely contain a great deal of personal information about former fellows who may still be alive.
67.
“This Issue’s Personality,” Nursette (July/September 1968), 25.
68.
B.S. Perera, “George Selvaraja Ratnavale,” Royal College of London: Inspiring Physicians, vol. X, 402, https://history.rcplondon.ac.uk/inspiring-physicians/george-selvaraja-ratnavale. This profile mentions Dr. Ratnavale’s Colombo Plan fellowship, and a search of LAC records confirms this to be the case. Dr. Ratnavale was clearly an exceptional student, coming “first in every professional examination. In the final examination he came first and won distinctions in all subjects. . . . He was awarded the coveted Perry exhibition, an award given to the best student in three years.”
69.
“Mary Charlotte Alexandra Weerasekera,” Toronto Star, 3 July 2010, GT8. Fortunately, the record for Dr. Weerasekera includes her complete name, country of origin, and training specialization, confirming that this is the same Dr. Weerasekera. A search of records at LAC indicates that her husband, Walter, also received a Colombo Plan fellowship to train in psychiatry.
70.
K.P. Mathur, The Unseen Indira Gandhi: Through Her Physician’s Eyes (New Delhi: Konark, 2016), loc. 99 of 1563, Kindle.
71.
Mathur, Indira Gandhi, loc. 117 of 1563.
72.
Jagdish Mathur, email message to author, 2 March 2020. Dr. Mathur remembered his time in Canada fondly, and though both are now deceased, he and Dr. Finlay reconnected following the publication of Dr. Mathur’s memoir. Rajiv Mathur, email message to author, 4 March 2020.
73.
D.L. Thomson to Professor D.K. Kevan, 17 February 1960, McGill Archives, RG 36, C. 107 1260 C, File Colombo Plan 1959–60.
74.
Mullally and Wright, “Connecting to Canada,” 235–42.
75.
The doctor interviewed by Compton Brouwer, mentioned in note 13, eventually made the difficult decision to stay on in Canada rather than return to Korea, which, by the end of his education, had been torn apart by war. Compton Brouwer, Modern Women Modernizing Men, x.
76.
J.N. Crawford to A.L. Chute, 27 February 1968, UTARMS, Faculty of Medicine, A1976-0044, Box 231.
77.
A.L. Chute to Allan J. MacEachen, 5 January 1968, UTARMS, Faculty of Medicine, A1976-044, Box 231.
78.
Allan J. MacEachen to A.L. Chute, 15 January 1968, UTARMS, Faculty of Medicine, A1976-044, Box 231.
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Canadian Bulletin of Medical History
Volume 38 • Number 1 • spring/printemps 2021
Pages: 1 - 31
PubMed: 33831311
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Canadian Society for the History of Medicine / Société canadienne d’histoire de la médecine 2021.
History
Received: 25 April 2020
Accepted: 6 July 2020
Published in print: spring/printemps 2021
Published online: 5 April 2021
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