What Is a "Health" Professional? The Changing Relationship of Occupational Therapists and Social Workers to Therapy and Healthcare in Quebec, 1940-1985

Studies regarding the medicalization process generally focus on the way various physical and psychological conditions have been identified as "health" problems, within specific historical contexts. Less well known is how the therapeutic roles of certain "health" professionals were also a result of the confluence of particular historical events. By comparing the professional trajectories of Quebec's occupational therapists and hospital social workers from 1940 to 1985, this article demonstrates how professionals originally outside of the world of health care created new therapeutic roles for themselves within the constantly expanding institutional health care system.