Keeping this young country sane: C. K. Clarke, immigration restriction, and Canadian psychiatry, 1890-1925

One of the most neglected aspects of the history of eugenics in Canada and elsewhere is the contributions psychiatrists made to the debate over immigration restriction. To date historians of eugenics have tended to argue that physicians in general and psychiatrists in particular supported the medical inspection of immigrants chiefly for nativist and xenophobic reasons. However, a study of the career of C. K. Clarke (1857-1924), arguably Canada's most famous psychiatrist and a prominent participant in Canada's early-20th-century debate over immigration, belies such a simple explanation. It shows that Clarke's interest in the topic derived from a complex combination of personal, professional, and cultural factors that characterized Canadian-American history between the 1890's and the depression.