Chesterfield Inlet, 1949, and the Ecology of Epidemic Polio

Rendering Inuit cancer “visible”: Geography, pathology, and nosology in Arctic cancer research

“…Peart was sympathetic to Stewart's request, as he himself had a vested interest in understanding Inuit disease patterns. In fact, just a few years earlier, Peart had been involved in a large-scale study of a 1949 polio epidemic that had taken place in Igluligaarjuk (Chesterfield Inlet) and was aware of the many biomedical insights that research into Arctic bodies and environments could provide (Piper 2015). Peart replied that although he was most interested in the epidemiology of cancer, neither he nor his department had the resources available to carry out a study of this kind (Peart, 8 Aug 1952).…”

“…In my analysis, I draw upon the large body of scholarship that has explored how colonial spaces have functioned as scientific resources (Gouda 2000;Lock and Nguyen 2010, 179;Tilly 2011). Just as scholars have shown how Indonesia and Africa came to be reconfigured as experimental or "living laboratories" over the course of the twentieth century, the North was similarly seen as an important site of biological knowledge production (Tuhiwai Smith 1999;Farish 2013;Wiseman 2015;Piper 2015;Lanzarotta 2020). As we will see, this was especially true in the domain of cancer research, as polar places and peoples were increasingly conceptualized as important medical resources that could be leveraged for the benefit of white Euro-American society.…”