CANADA
CBC News
by Jody Porter, CBC News Posted: Aug 8, 2013
A local doctor and a school nurse experimented with 14 different drugs to treat “ear troubles” in children at Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School in Kenora, according to a 1954 report obtained by CBC News.
The report, from the Indian and Northern Health Services archive, said that some of the children being treated became deaf.
School nurse Kathleen Stewart wrote the report, entitled “Record of Ear Treatments and Investigation.”
“The most conspicuous evidence of ear trouble at Cecilia Jeffrey School has been the offensive odour of the children’s breath, discharging ears, lack of sustained attention, poor enunciation when speaking and loud talking,” she wrote.
Students at the Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School in Kenora were the subject of nutritional experiments and exposed to experimental treatments for ear infections. Some became deaf.
So Stewart said the children were taught to irrigate their own ears, or the ears of younger children, with hot water. A doctor visited the school on a weekly basis looking out for ear infections “and the recommended medicine was used when possible,” Stewart wrote.
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