Same View, Many Lenses

Evelyn L. Forget

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Between any two points in time lies an infinite density of historical
events. The veracity of each of these events can be known, with more
or less certainty, depending on the quality of the archival record and the
diligence of the historians mining it. Fact checking, however, is a very
minor part of constructing histories. The art of writing history lies in dis-
tinguishing between relevant and irrelevant events, establishing begin-
nings and endings, and building narrative bridges between the relevant
events in such a way as to establish meaning. It follows that any two or
more points in time can be linked in a very large number of ways. Mul-
tiple histories are not only conceivable but usual, and no amount of fact
checking will eliminate them.
Historians of economics have three tasks. First, we must establish
the “facts” of history—the raw material out of which histories are con-
structed. To agree that multiple perspectives are possible does not excuse
us from trying to establish what actually happened at particular points in
time. As challenging as it may be to establish the facts, it is nevertheless
the case that the most interesting historical conflicts do not center on
what really happened, but on what meaning these events imply. Second,
we must demonstrate the possibility of multiple, equally valid, histories
to those convinced of the objectivity of their own story. This involves

Correspondence may be addressed to Evelyn L. Forget, Community Health Sciences, Faculty of

Medicine, University of Manitoba, 750 Bannatyne Avenue, Winnipeg, MB R3E 0W3; e-mail:
forget@cc.umanitoba.ca.
History of Political Economy 37:2 © 2005 by Duke University Press.
206 History of Political Economy 37:2 (2005)

collecting and documenting the various histories that are constructed,

knowingly and unknowingly, by those with a stake in the telling. Third,
and most important, it is our duty to help people to understand the im-
plications of various ways of telling history. If generations of graduate
students at the University of Chicago are taught a particular and perhaps

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questionable version of the past, what does it matter? It matters because
the histories we tell create the boundaries within which our imaginations
can range, and thereby constrain the future.
None of these claims would be extraordinary if we were postcolonial
or feminist historians. Let me tell a personal history.1 I was at a meeting
in Ottawa with about thirty-five people—six from the First Nations and
Inuit Health Branch of Health Canada, three more regional representa-
tives from Health Canada, a couple of team members, official representa-
tives from the Assembly of First Nations and an Inuit health organization,
and the rest from various First Nations communities.2 We began with in-
troductions. I spoke third, and I am a slow learner. I said, “My name is
Evelyn Forget, and I’m the health economist on the team.” The woman
beside me said, “My name is Jackie, and my language is Ojibwa. I’m
here on behalf of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs. I come from Mystic
Bay, which is a remote fly-in community five-hundred kilometers north
of The Pas. I went to school at God’s Lake. My parents were both in res-
idential schools. I was health director for seven years before I went to
work for the Chiefs . . . ” and so on.
By the time we got around the table, I learned that two of the older
women in the room had been born in tents with the assistance of mid-
wives. About a fifth came from fly-in reserves. Several had been to resi-
dential schools.3 The Inuit woman had been relocated to the high Arctic

1. If I were a journalist with my eye on a Pulitzer, I would do this differently. But I am

only an academic constrained by a research ethics board, so I have changed names of people
and places, and omitted identifying details. This story is a composite, but like most histories,
its truth lies less in its facts than its telling.
2. First Nations are groups of Aboriginal people with rights, and usually a land base, es-
tablished through treaty. Aboriginal is a more inclusive term that includes First Nations, Inuit,
Métis, and mixed-race people. Aboriginal people are self-identified; First Nations people have
treaty numbers.
3. Residential schools are boarding schools that were used to educate Aboriginal children
for most of the twentieth century. The churches that ran them, and the governments that fos-
tered them, have been accused of tolerating physical, emotional, and sexual abuse of students,
while stripping them of their language and heritage. Fraught and contentious political and le-
gal processes are currently under way to resolve the conflict. A fly-in “reserve” (the Canadian
version of an Indian reservation in the United States) is accessible only by airplane.
 Forget / Same View 207

as part of the Canadian attempt to secure the remote northern islands

during the Cold War. Two of the delegates were chiefs but they, some-
what uncharacteristically, did not emphasize that role. All of the Quebec
delegates spoke in French, said they would speak in French throughout
since they were more comfortable in that language, and asked that we

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all use our simultaneous translation headsets. After we shuffled about,
accessing and testing headsets, they switched to English for the duration
of the meeting.
Each introduction went on for several minutes, and the history was
very explicit. I understood only some of it. There is clearly more sig-
nificance in the idea of a remote fly-in reserve than I understand even
now. After two days of meetings, I began to realize that the reason two
women told us that they had been born with the assistance of midwives
was to establish their position as elders, and therefore entitled to a cer-
tain regard. I am certain I missed a great deal, and misinterpreted much,
but these stories were not for my benefit. It seemed to me that the most
important consequence of the extended introductions was the establish-
ment of familial connections—shared communities, shared experiences,
and family ties across many separate and quasi-sovereign First Nations.
My own introduction was understood immediately by my people—
Amir and Yusuf from Health Canada. Afterwards, we chatted about jobs
and training and publications and databases, establishing our own kin-
ship. My introduction gave so little information to the others that two
Aboriginal delegates afterward asked me what [Aboriginal] community
I came from and the woman from the Assembly of First Nations gave
me an expense form for reimbursement. I could have told an equally true
story that would have bewildered the Health Canada folks: my mother’s
paternal family arrived in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, in 1750. Her family
came from Montbeliard, at that time an independent principality that be-
came part of France in 1793, with the encouragement of revolutionary
troops. They were “Foreign Protestants” recruited by the British gover-
nor as farmers to fill up the land after the French Catholic Acadians were
expelled. Never having seen the ocean, the promise of fertile farmland
was probably enough to convince them to board small wooden boats
and spend two months on the North Atlantic before being dumped on a
rock at the beginning of winter, generously supplied with a half barrel of
molasses, another of salt pork, and not nearly enough rum. My father’s
paternal family showed up in a 1750 census, labeled fishers, in a small
208 History of Political Economy 37:2 (2005)

Newfoundland outport, no doubt fleeing some form of authority some-

where. My parents moved to Toronto in the early 1950s to find more
prosperous lives. If I told the story with as much detail as the others, I
think I would have discovered cousins among the delegates as well. Two
centuries is a long time. But that would be to miss the point. Establishing

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connections means, simultaneously, determining who is and who is not
a member of a particular group.
My point is that history confers identity. The deeper the history that
we tell, the wider the range of current connections we can claim and
map. Even in a country with as short a recorded history as Canada, there
exists a multiplicity of historical narratives. While not all the “facts”
of colonial history in Canada are uncontested, most of the controversy
stems not from disputes about what happened, but about what is impor-
tant and what it means.
Let me tell a second story. My department is made up mostly of epi-
demiologists. A large minority are MDs, and the others come from var-
ious backgrounds. None of my colleagues has any training in history. I
have, nonetheless, heard the story of John Snow and the wretched Broad
Street pump handle many, many times. Why has that particular story be-
come the foundation story for modern epidemiology?
We teach medical students the story of Snow, cholera, and the pump
handle because it serves, efficiently and simultaneously, many different
purposes. Population health is an important part of our curriculum. This
history recounts the tale of the hero who established the importance of
population health. It teaches method: medical students have a dispro-
portionate reverence for “clinical opinion,” and not much regard for ev-
idence. But Snow, we claim, identified a particular water pump on the
bank of the Thames that was spreading cholera by mapping all the iden-
tified cases and noting that they clustered around one water pump. He
did not rely on the sample of people who showed up in his practice with
cholera; he mapped them all. He was not swayed by clinical opinion,
which was infected with the theory of miasma. There was no theory
to support his action. The evidence told him what to do. And, being an
interventionist, he removed the pump handle, thereby saving countless
lives.4

4. The story, needless to say, is more complicated than we usually acknowledge. For more
details and references, see the Department of Epidemiology’s Web site at UCLA http://www
.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow.html.
 Forget / Same View 209

The story is also important for another reason. Medical faculties, like
all other academic faculties, are full of hierarchies. The most important
one is whether or not you write MD after your name. MDs save lives,
but they only save them one at a time. Epidemiologists save hundreds of
lives at a time. We are at least as important as MDs.

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History is about identity. If I demonstrated that Snow and his pump
handle never existed, the story would still be told. If I informed my col-
leagues that our story is bad history, which it is, they would not under-
stand my point. And why should they? The story does what it is meant
to do. If I plan to replace it with “better” history, I have to offer a story
that serves the same set of purposes at least as well.
Is either of these anecdotes of relevance to historians of economics?
There is a technique in health economics known as cost-utility analysis.
It is a method of measuring the health-related utility associated with par-
ticular health states that purportedly allows researchers to weight years
of life by “quality” of life. There are at least three, somewhat inconsis-
tent, histories of the technique, but none of the “facts” is in dispute. One
history begins in the 1960s, when two groups of researchers began to
develop the clinical scales that had been used since at least the 1930s
to measure health outcomes. A second history begins with the decision
analysis developed by von Neumann and Morgenstern in the 1940s. A
third begins with Daniel Bernoulli in 1738. Each of these histories car-
ries with it different cautionary tales, different methodological preoccu-
pations, and different implied trajectories for future development. None
of these histories is factually questionable, but a historian who can help
those who use the techniques understand that different perspectives are
possible can, potentially, have an impact on the development and valida-
tion of a widely used tool.5
Historians of economics are keepers of the stories, and storytellers are
very powerful people in most cultures. They listen to other people’s sto-
ries carefully, because they learn a great deal even when the stories they
hear are factually incorrect. Historians make their listeners aware of the
ways that other people see, and have seen, things. But the stories they
tell must be good stories, with heroes and villains, plot and crisis, timing
and resolution. Otherwise no one remembers them. Just being correct is
not good enough. If the storytellers have done their job well, then people
begin to recognize that there are many ways of doing and seeing things,

5. For more details, see Forget 2004.

210 History of Political Economy 37:2 (2005)

and that each perspective yields different insights and carries with it dif-
ferent blind spots. They begin to acknowledge that it is important to have
the “facts” correct, but that the facts are not the most important part of
the stories they tell. We can correct error related to particular historical
events, but we delude ourselves if we believe that a definitive history is

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possible. Fortunately, no one else is likely to be taken in by our hubris.

Reference
Forget, E. L. 2004. Contested Histories of an Applied Field: The Case of Health
Economics. HOPE 36.4:617–37.