Chapter I: “doctor”

Grenfell and Labrador are names that must go down in history together. Of the man and of his sea-beaten, wind-swept “parish” it will be said, as Kipling wrote of Cecil Rhodes:

“Living he was the land, and dead
His soul shall be her soul.”

Some folk may try to tell us that Wilfred Thomason Grenfell, C.M.G., gets more credit than is due him: but while they cavil and insinuate the Recording Angel smiles and writes down more golden deeds for this descendant of an Elizabethan sea-dog. Sir Richard Grenville, of the _Revenge_, as Tennyson tells us—stood off sixty-three ships of Spain’s Armada, and was mortally wounded in the fight, crying out as he fell upon the deck: “I have only done my duty, as a man is bound to do.” That tradition of heroic devotion to duty, and of service to mankind, is ineradicable from the Grenfell blood.

“We’ve had a hideous winter,” the Doctor said, as I clasped hands with him in June at the office of the Grenfell Association in New York. His hair was whiter and his bronzed face more serious than when I last had seen him; but the unforgettable look in his eyes of resolution and of self-command was there as of old, intensified by the added years of warfare with belligerent nature and sometimes recalcitrant mankind. For a few moments when he talks sentence may link itself to sentence very gravely, but nobody ever knew the Doctor to go long without that keen, bright flash of a smile, provoked by a ready and a constant sense of fun, that illumines his face like a pulsation of the Northern Lights, and—unless you are hard as steel at heart—must make you love him, and do what he wants you to do.

The Doctor on this occasion was a month late for his appointment with the board of directors of the Grenfell Association. His little steamer, the _Strathcona_, had been frozen in off his base of operations and inspirations at St. Anthony. So he started afoot for Conch to catch a launch that would take him to the railroad. He was three days covering a distance which in summer would have required but a few hours, in the direction of White Bay on the East Coast. He slept on the beach in wet clothes. Then he was caught on pans of ice and fired guns to attract the notice of any chance vessel. Once more ashore, he vainly started five times more from St. Anthony harbour. Finally he went north and walked along the coast, cutting across when he could, eighty miles to Flower’s Cove. In the meantime the _Strathcona_, with Mrs. Grenfell aboard, was imprisoned in the ice on the way to Seal Harbour; and it was three weeks before Mrs. Grenfell, with the aid of two motor-boats, reached the railroad by way of Shoe Cove.

At Flower’s Cove the Doctor rapped at the door of Parson Richards. That good man fairly broke into an alleluia to behold him. With beaming face he started to prepare his hero a cup of tea. But there came a cry at the door: “Abe Gould has shot himself in the leg!”

Out into the cold and the dark again the Doctor stumbled. He put his hand into the leg and took out the bone and the infected parts with such instruments as he had. Then he sat up all night, feeding his patient sleeping potions of opium. With the day came the mail-boat for the south, the Ethie, beaten back from two desperate attempts to penetrate the ice of the Strait to Labrador.

Two months later I rejoined the Doctor at Croucher’s wharf, at Battle Harbour, Labrador.

The little _Strathcona_, snuggling against the piles, was redolent of whalemeat for the dogs, her decks piled high with spruce and fir, white birch and juniper, for her insatiable fires. (Coal was then $24 a ton.)

“Where’ve you been all this time?” the Doctor cried, as I flung my belongings to his deck from the _Ethie’s_ mail-boat, and he held out both hands with his radiant smile of greeting. “I’m just about to make the rounds of the hospital. This is a busy day. We pull out for St. Anthony tonight!” With that he took me straight to the bedside of his patients in the little Battle Harbour hospital that wears across its battered face the legend: “Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of the least of these my brethren ye did it unto me.”

The first man was recovering from typhoid, and the Doctor, with a smile, was satisfied with his convalescence.

The next man complained of a pain in the abdomen. Dr. Grenfell inquired about the intensity of the pain, the temperature, the appetite and the sleep of the patient.

“He has two of the four cardinal symptoms,” said the Doctor, “pain and temperature. Probably it’s an appendical attack. We had a boy who—like this man—looked all right outwardly, and yet was found to have a bad appendix.”

The Doctor has a way of thinking aloud as he goes along, and taking others into his confidence—frequently by an interrogation which is flattering in the way in which he imputes superior knowledge to the one of whom the question is asked. It is a liberal education in the healing craft to go about with him, for he is never secretive or mysterious—he is frankly human instead of oracular.

“How about your schooner?” was his next question. “Do you think that they can get along without you?”

He never forgets that these are fishermen, whose livelihood depends on getting every hour they can with their cod-traps, and the stages and the flakes where the fish is salted and spread to dry.

The third patient was a whaler. He had caught his hand in a winch. The bones of the second and third fingers of the right hand were cracked, and the tips of those fingers had been cut off. The hand lay in a hot bath.

“Dirty work, whaling,” was the Doctor’s comment, as he examined the wound. “Everything is rotten meat and a wound easily becomes infected.”

Number four was a baffling case of multiple gangrene. This Bonne Bay fisherman had a nose and an ear that looked as if they had turned to black rubber. His toes were sloughing off. The back of his right hand was like raw beef. His left leg was bent at an angle of 90 degrees, and as it could not bear the pressure of the bedclothes a scaffolding had been built over it. The teeth were gone, and when the dressings were removed even the plucking of the small hairs on the leg gave the patient agony.

“What have you been eating?”

“Potatoes, sir.”

“What else?”

“Turnips, sir.”

“You need green food. Fresh vegetable salts.”

The Doctor looked out of the window and saw a dandelion in the rank green grass. “That’s what he ought to have,” was his comment.

On the verandah were four out-of-door patients to whom fresh air was essential. One had a tubercular spine. A roll of plaster had been coming by freight all summer long and was impatiently awaited. But a delay of months on the Labrador is nothing unusual. Dr. Daly, of Harvard, presented the _Strathcona_ with a searchlight, and it was two years on the way—most of that time stored in a warehouse at North Sydney.

Around these fresh-air cases the verandah was netted with rabbit-wire. That was to keep the dogs from breaking in and possibly eating the patients, who are in mortal terror of the dogs.

When the Doctor took a probe from the hand of a trusted assistant he was careful to ask if it was sterile ere he used it. He constantly took his juniors—in this instance, Johns Hopkins doctors—into consultation. “What do you think?” was his frequent query.

The use of unhallowed patent medicines gave him distress. “O the stuff the people put into themselves!” he exclaimed.

“Have we got a Dakin solution?” he asked presently.

“We’ve been trying to get a chloramine solution all summer,” answered one of the young physicians.

The Doctor made a careful examination of the man with the tubercular spine, who was encased in plaster from the waist up. “After all,” was his comment as he rose to his feet, “doctors don’t do anything but keep things clean.”

In the women’s ward the Harris Cot, the Torquay Cot, the Northfield Cot, the Victoria Cot, the Kingman Cot, the Exeter Cot were filled with patient souls whose faces shone as the Doctor passed. “More fresh air!” he ejaculated, and other windows were opened. Those who came from homes hermetically sealed have not always understood the Doctor’s passion for ozone. One man complained that the wind got in his teeth and a girl said that the singing on Sundays strained her stomach.

He had a remarkable memory for the history of each case. “The day after you left her heart started into fibrillation,” said an assistant. “It was there before we left,” answered the Doctor quietly.

At one bedside where an operation of a novel nature had been performed he remarked, “I simply hate leaving an opening when I don’t know how to close it.”

He never pretends to know it all: he never sits down with folded hands in the face of a difficulty or “passes the buck” to another. In his running commentary while he looks the patient over he confesses his perplexities. Yet all that he says confirms rather than shakes the patient’s confidence in him. Those whom he serves almost believe that he can all but raise the dead.

“Now this rash,” he said, “might mean the New World smallpox—but probably it doesn’t. We’ve only had two deaths from that malady on the coast. It ran synchronously with the ‘flu.’ In one household where there were three children and a man, one child and the man got it and two children escaped it.

“This woman’s ulcers are the sequel to smallpox. She needs the vegetable salts of a fresh diet. How to get green things for her is the problem. And this patient has tubercular caries of the hip. The X-ray apparatus is across the Straits at St. Anthony, sixty miles away. If we only had a portable X-ray apparatus of the kind they used in the war! Now you see, no matter what the weather, this woman must be taken across the Straits because we are entirely without the proper appliances here.”

Screens were put around the cots as the examination was made, so that the others wouldn’t be harrowed by the sight of blood or pain.

The sick seemed to find comfort merely in being able to describe their symptoms to a wise, good man. Much of the trouble seemed actually to evaporate as they talked to him. Miss Dohme and the other nurses kept the rooms spotlessly clean, and gay bowls of buttercups were about.

“I don’t feel nice, Doctor,” said the next woman. “Some mornings a kind of dead, dreary feeling seems to come out of me stummick and go right down me laigs. Sometimes it flutters; sometimes it lies down. The wind’s wonderful strong today, and it’s rising.”

Usually the diagnosis is not greatly helped by the patient, who meekly answers the questions with “Yes, Doctor,” or “No, Doctor,” or describes the symptoms with such poetic vagueness that a great deal is left to the imagination. It takes patient cross-questioning—in which the Doctor is an adept—to elicit the truth.

Here is a dear little baby, warmly muffled, on the piazza with the elixir of the sun and the pine air. The pustular eczema has been treated with ammoniate of mercury—but what will happen when the infant goes home to the old malnutrition and want of sanitation? If only the Doctor could follow the case!

Bathtubs are a mystery to some of the patients, who after they have been undressed and led to the water’s edge ask plaintively, “What do you want me to do now?”

So many times in this little hospital one was smitten by the need of green vegetables which in so many places are not to be had—“greens” (like spinach), lettuce, radishes and the rest.

As we came away the Doctor spoke of the feeling that he used to have that wherever a battle for the right was on anywhere he must take part in it. “But I have learned that they also serve who simply do their duty in their places. These dogs hereabouts seem to think they must go to every fight there is, near or far. But none of us is called upon to do all there is to do. I often read of happenings in distant parts of the earth and feel as though I ought to be there in the thick of things. Then I realize that if we all minded our own business exactly where we are we’d be doing well. And when such thoughts come to me I just make up my mind to be contented and to buckle down to my job all the harder.”