Professor Emeritus Margaret Lock joined McGill University in 1977. On 5 June 2017, McGill PhD student Cynthia Tang talked with Professor Lock at her home about her time in the department, its transformations, and its priorities over the years. The text below is excerpted from the transcript of the conversation between Lock and Tang, lighted edited by Todd Meyers for clarity and length.
Beginnings
When I joined the department was called the Department of the History of Medicine. The person who hired me was the founding member, Don Bates, who was an MD with a PhD in history. He had originally worked in and ran the Osler Library. Then he was given encouragement from presumably the Dean’s Office to do what he wanted to do, which was to create an interdisciplinary department in the Faculty of Medicine, explicitly with the parameters that it would be embedded in Medicine right from the start. He was given the green light and the first person that he hired was Joseph Lella, a sociologist. I was next. Joe was already very embedded in medical education, so he was a natural for the new department, and when I came, the first thing Joe said to me was, “You’re going to become a medical educator,” and my heart sank.
But to backtrack a moment: Don got himself out to California to interview possible medical anthropologists for a further position in the department. He had put out a posting and all the applicants happened to be from California. We all knew each other very well. It was a fascinating experience undergoing this interview, but it was also quite funny because Don was a very physically active person. He did marathons and the like and his idea of interviewing someone was to go on a walk with them! I don’t remember in which order he interviewed us, but it was fine with me, I was used to walking. None of us knew ahead of time that we were going to be walking, but I happened to have shoes that were good for walking. This was Berkeley in the 60s, so we were all looking a bit hippie-dippie. One man being interviewed came along wearing a pair of sandals that didn’t even fit properly and sort of slopped around. Don made him go on a serious walk, so he was absolutely bent over with blisters afterwards and in terrible shape. Anyway, we completed those interviews and then I think two of us were eventually asked to come to Montreal.
Leaving California
I must say, for me the trip was a huge shock. I’d been living in Berkeley for probably 13 or 14 years because I had been working there before I commenced my PhD. My original training had been in biochemistry and microbiology from Leeds University in England. I then went to Toronto as part of what was called the Brain Drain at the time when Brits coming to Canada to do research had their airfare paid by the Canadian government. I worked in a lab run by John Evans at the Toronto General Hospital, who was recently awarded the prestigious Friesen International Prize in health research. I was working in his lab as a biochemist, but after a year or so, I decided that I really wanted to go out West. So, with an Australian friend, we bought an old car, and drove all the way across Canada. There wasn’t even a road at that time, just a dirt trail. We met bears and other wildlife and had many adventures and numerous burst tires, which we became extraordinarily good at changing. Then I went from Vancouver up north to the Yukon and worked in Dawson City in a bar called the Bonanza Inn and then came south again and worked in a lab in Vancouver. After about a year I decided that I wanted to get work in Northern California. I took the Greyhound bus to San Francisco and worked in the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) medical center as a lab tech, where my future husband Richard was working at the time, although on a different floor. Later I moved to a lab in Richmond on the Oakland side of the Bay Area but eventually decided that I didn’t want to be a lab tech for the rest of my life. Richard and I went off to Japan where we were learning Japanese and teaching English. A couple of years later I applied to Berkeley. Initially I was told by the anthropologist Jack Potter that I probably wasn’t good enough for Berkeley and I should try elsewhere, so I first studied in the East Asian Studies Department for a year, and then was able to switch into Anthropology where I obtained an MA and PhD and followed up with a postdoc at UCSF. Of course all this training involved going to Japan for several stints of research amounting to several years in all. When Don came out to Berkeley for the interview he covered everything very meticulously. By this time I had two tiny children and so with considerable trepidation, I must say, I decided to take the job. There was no such thing as spousal hires in those days, and Richard, with a PhD in comparative literature from Berkeley, kindly agreed to move even without a job. And we’ve been here ever since. I was offered a job a decade later back at Berkeley, and thought about it and decided, no, we like it here, we all want to stay here. Our Californian friends thought we were crazy.
Growth
Don had always planned to first hire a sociologist, then an anthropologist, followed by another historian. He had that in his mind from the beginning and so that was how things unfolded. George [Weisz] was hired after I had been in the department for several years. It was clear from the students who were applying that it would make sense to hire another anthropologist rather than a second sociologist. So at that point we hired Allan Young. We remained stable and productive for several years, although Joe Lella left, after which we hired Alberto [Cambrosio] and then Thomas [Schlich]. Faith [Wallis] had long been attached to the department, by this time called Social Studies of Medicine. It was agreed all along that we wanted to retain and develop the three prongs of the department: history, sociology, and anthropology. It has always been a touch top heavy in history because of the department’s origins as History of Medicine. The anthropology arm, Allan [Young] and myself, have always taken our cross appointments in anthropology very seriously and have had very active links with the Department of Anthropology. Many students of very high caliber have applied and a good number have been accepted every year to do graduate work in medical anthropology.
Faculty of Medicine
My impression is that SSoM has always done extraordinarily well in the Faculty of Medicine. At one point our Department was billed as a special feature of the University because it was so unusual to have a really strong, functioning department of social scientists and historians embedded in the medical faculty. We garnered a good reputation early on, in part because the Dean of Medicine at the time, Sam Freedman, had a son who had gone into medicine at the University of Toronto. Sam was telling his son what we were doing in the Faculty of Medicine and his son replied: “Oh I’m so envious, we don’t get that kind of training at Toronto and I really wish we had it.” That was really good PR for us. And since that time every single Dean of Medicine has been supportive. I think we have been fortunate, but in addition our selection of colleagues for the department over the years has been sound; we were able to select people who felt very comfortable being embedded in medicine.
Cultures of Medicine
The difficulty with anthropology in general is that anthropologists have long been concerned with the misplaced idea that some people have culture whereas others (by inference those who are ‘primitive’) do not. This is, of course nonsense. In America, Alfred Kroeber argued that the task of anthropologists was to analyze culture, that is, what shared ideas, language usage, and behaviors bind people together in groups, usually clearly named groups. Kroeber created a marked dichotomy between culture and nature (biology) and in effect set it to one side. Also, in some anthropology programs in North America, students are not taught any biological or physical anthropology, and in any case regard this as totally separate from cultural anthropology. I think the unexamined assumption about a marked dichotomy between biology and culture has landed the anthropology of biomedicine in a problematic place in a good number of anthropology departments. My argument over the last decade and longer has been explicitly that the task of anthropologists such as Allan [Young] and myself is to rejoin nature/nurture, culture/biology, and mind/body. I think this approach is in large part why our Department has a reputation of being strong intellectually.
Teaching Medical Anthropology
Allan [Young] and I had a very large number of medical anthropology students. The introductory course to medical anthropology was huge. The very first time ever I went to teach that course, we didn’t have a large enough room because there were already more than a hundred students. It had never been offered before. But clearly there was momentum among students and over the years it grew and grew. By the time I finished teaching it, we had 400 students in it each semester it was taught. We would offer it every year. Allan, too, kept up huge class sizes. It continues to be one of the two biggest classes in the whole of the Department of Anthropology. Allan and I found very quickly that students wanted to do seminars in medical anthropology and upper division courses in various kinds of medical anthropology.
Teaching Medical Students
My contribution to the medical school when I was originally hired in 1977 was rather special. The medical school had decided on a course wherein various stars from the Faculty of Medicine would be brought in to give one lecture each to the first year medical students throughout their first semester. Don Bates decided that I should run what was then called the Behavior Course. Charles Scriver, a very famous geneticist, and Balfour Mount who introduced palliative care to McGill, were among the speakers. I introduced them to the first year medical class and then had exchanges with them interspersed with questions from the students. For me, it was pretty terrifying, straight from an anthropology postdoc in California. But it worked well and continued that way for several years up until my first sabbatical when it was taken over by Danny Frank, who is in psychiatry at the Jewish General Hospital. Eventually the curriculum was reviewed and revised once again and we in SSoM no longer had a slot in first year medicine but instead started to contribute to teaching the 3rd and 4th year medical students. Our involvement with the medical faculty has changed over the years including the teaching contribution that we make. Don Bates had taught the history of medicine for many years as a whole semester course which was taken very seriously. Each time the curriculum was reviewed, maybe two or three times over the course of the last thirty years, the history of medicine was cut back reorganized it into time slots and made it much more like traditional medical school education at Harvard and other places with a much more standardized curriculum. So there have been a lot of changes, and each time our contribution has changed.
Deepening Relevance
The medical faculty has always been strong on the history of medicine because of the Osler heritage. Although in those early years, some of the med students complained because they didn’t think that an anthropologist could possibly teach them anything. Some of them would assess the course by saying, “Oh, it’s all just common sense, we know it all already,” and so on. Then over the years it changed in two ways. First, more and more women came into medical school, and second, the students were broken down into small groups where we really got to know them much better rather than by just giving big lectures. It struck me enormously when I taught some of those small groups from about the 90s on that a very high proportion of these students were themselves children of immigrants. Their parents had come from East Asia, southern Europe, South America and elsewhere to live in Québec, and their children knew exactly why it was important to learn about the social and cultural aspects of medicine to be a good doctor. Queries that arose about health in their own families all the time made it clear why one needed, as a doctor, to pay close attention to what patients think and say about the condition of their health.