User:Streetlampguy301/Charles Camsell Hospital

Charles Camsell Hospital
Geography
Location	Edmonton, Alberta
Services
Beds	385 (1967)
History
Opened	August 1946
Closed	c. 1993 (fully abandoned by 1996)

Charles Camsell Hospital was a hospital located in the Inglewood neighbourhood in Edmonton, Alberta. The hospital originally opened in August 1946, was rebuilt in 1967, and closed in 1993. As of 2023, the hospital is being redeveloped into a condominium.

History

In 1946, Lord Alexander, then Governor General of Canada, opened The Charles Camsell tuberculosis hospital in Edmonton, in a former Jesuit college built in 1910 and later occupied by the Canadian Army during World War II as a staff and administration building and medical corps hospital during construction of the Alaska Highway 1942-1945. This hospital, which was located in the Inglewood area, was named after Charles Camsell (1876–1958), who was at the time Commissioner of the Northwest Territories as well as a geologist and map-maker dedicated to the exploration of Canada's North. It was operated by the Indian Health Service of the Department of National Health and Welfare and later transferred to the Department of Indian Affairs.

In 1964 the Department of Indian Affairs established the Northern Medical Research Unit under the direction of Otto Schaefer. The Unit was created to address the overwhelming response to a 1959 paper about Arctic health Schaefer published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. The paper was a summary of his medical and personal observations of the changes to Inuit lifestyle with the coming of the Distant Early Warning Line (DEW Line) and increasing southern influence. For the next two decades Schaefer and his staff travelled the Arctic collecting medical information, administering vaccinations to remote camps, and seeing to the general health care of Inuit and First Nations groups in the Arctic. The Unit spent two months a year in the Arctic, as well as occasional emergency trips, and at the Charles Camsell Hospital analysing the data collected and seeing to patients. The conclusions of this research indicated changes to traditional life by increased influence of southern non-indigenous culture on lifestyle, diet, and social structure had enormous negative health effects. Schaefer became a vocal advocate for a return to traditional lifestyles as a means of countering declining health and better treating medical problems in the Arctic and in hospitals like the Charles Camsell.

A new 385-bed Charles Camsell Hospital was completed in 1967 at 128th Street and 114th Avenue in Edmonton, Alberta. The hospital merged with the Royal Alexandra Hospital in October 1992 and was later closed in 1993. The hospital was left completely abandoned by 1996, due in part to asbestos, and in part due to its history in Canadian genocide and eugenics. In the following few decades, the hospital would be owned by a number of people with redevelopment in mind, and some construction and gutting of the interior has taken place, but nothing substantial had been done. The movie Intern Academy, released in 2004, was filmed in this hospital. In 2006, a fire broke out in the building caused by a demolition crew, but firefighters had to fight the fire from the outside of the building since barbed wire had been wrapped around the railings of staircases, in a poor attempt to keep the homeless population out of the building. Redevelopment of the former hospital began to occur more prominently in the mid-to-late 2010s. The hospital is currently being redeveloped into a condominium.

Relationship with Indigenous peoples

Between 1945 and 1967, the hospital operated an occupational therapy program for indigenous patients. During the 1960s and into the 1980s, the hospital was apart of the Albertan Eugenics programs in order to sterilize indigenous peoples. Numerous class-action lawsuits against both the province and Canada would later be filed as a result. During the Sixties Scoop, the hospital was also a place where medical testing was performed on natives, and from where indigenous children were abducted to be adopted by non-indigenous peoples. In 1990, the hospital donated a collection of over 400 arts and crafts items made by patients in the program to the Royal Alberta Museum.

Concerns of possible unmarked graves of indigenous people were raised in 2021 after unmarked graves were located at various former residential school sites throughout Canada. Searches conducted of the hospital site between July and October 2021 however found no evidence of unmarked graves at the site.