Sanitary Medicine and the Social Body: The case of National Civil Registration and Statistics in Canada, 1855–75

Civil registration and vital statistics are important elements in the definition of a social body, the primary object whose health and well-being is the aim of social medicine. The failure of the federal government to organize a national system of civil registration in the Confederation era is placed in the context of a variety of sources of pressure for it to do so from doctors, social reformers, and provincial and municipal officials.