Chapter IV: All in the Day’s Work

It was hard to say where the Doctor’s day began or ended. One night he rose several times to inspect wind and weather ere deciding to make a start; and at twenty minutes before five he was at the wheel himself. Mrs. Grenfell clipped from “Life” and pinned upon his tiny stateroom mirror a picture of a caterpillar showing to a class of worms the early bird eating the worm. The legend beneath it ran: “Now remember, dear children, the lesson for today—the disobedient worm that would persist in getting up too early in the morning.”

His books and articles are usually written between the early hours of five and seven o’clock in the morning. The log of the _Strathcona_, religiously kept for the information of the International Grenfell Association, was likely to be pencilled on his knee while sitting on a pile of firewood on the reeling deck. Just as Roosevelt wrote his African game-hunting articles “on safari,” while so wearied with the chase that he could hardly keep his eyes open, the Doctor has schooled himself to do his work without considering his pulse-beat or his temperature or his blood pressure. After a driving day afloat and ashore, as surgeon, magistrate, minister and skipper, he rarely retires before midnight, and often he sits up till the wee small hours engrossed in the perusal of a book he likes.

When the Doctor enters a harbour unannounced and drops anchor, within a few minutes power-boats and rowboats are flocking about the _Strathcona_, and the deck fills with fishermen, their wives and their children, all with their major and minor troubles. Sometimes it requires the whole family to bring a patient. Often after a diagnosis it seems advisable to place a patient in the hospital at Battle Harbour or St. Anthony, and so the “Torquay Cot” or another in the diminutive hospital on the _Strathcona_ is filled, or perhaps the passenger goes to hob-nob with the good-natured crew and consume their victuals. Many a crying baby, in the limited space, makes the narrow quarters below-decks reverberate with the heraldry of the fact that he is teething or has the tummyache.

The Doctor operates at the foot of the companion-ladder leading down into the saloon, which is dining-room, living-room and everything else. “I always have a basin of blood at the foot of the ladder,” he grimly remarks.

I told him I thought I would call what I wrote about him “From Topsails to Tonsils,” since with such versatility he passed from the former to the latter. “That reminds me,” he said with a laugh, “of the time I went ashore with Dr. John Adams, and the first thing we did was to lay three children out on the table and remove their tonsils. That was a mighty bloody job, I can tell you!”

The hatchway over his head as he operates is always filled with the heads of so many spectators—including frequently the Doctor’s dog, Fritz—that the meagre light which comes from above is nearly shut off. Often a lamp is necessary, and as electric flash-lamps are notoriously faithless in a crisis, it is usually a kerosene lamp. Often an impatient patient starts to come down before his time, or an over-eager parent or husband thinks he must accompany the one that he has brought for the doctor’s lancet. It is hard to get elbow-room for the necessary surgery, and every operation is a more or less public clinical demonstration.

Usually the description of the symptoms is of the vaguest.

“I’m chilled to the cinders,” said an anxious Irishman.

“Well, we can put on some fresh coal,” was the Doctor’s answer. “How old are you?”

“Forty-six, Doctor!”

“A mere child!” the doctor replies, and the merry twinkle in his eyes brings an answering smile to the face of the sufferer. The Doctor himself was fifty-five years old in February, 1920.

So many fishermen get what are called “water-whelps” or “water-pups,”—pustules on the forearm due to the abrasion of the skin by more or less infected clothing. Cleaning the cod and cutting up fish produces many ugly cuts and piercings and consequent sores, and there is always plenty of putrefying matter about a fishing-stage to infect them. So that a very common phenomenon is a great swelling on the forearm—and an agonizing, sleep-destroying one it may be—where pus has collected and is throbbing for the lance. It is a joy to witness the immediate relief that comes from the cutting, and as the iodine is applied and deft fingers bandage the wound the patient tries to find words to tell of his thankfulness.

One afternoon just as the Doctor thought there was a lull in the proceedings four women and a man came over the rail at once. The first woman had a “bad stummick”; the second wanted “turble bad” to have her tooth “hauled”; the third had “a sore neck, Miss” (thus addressing Mrs. Grenfell); the fourth woman had something “too turble to tell”; the man merely wanted to see the Doctor on general principles.

Here is a bit of dialogue with a woman who couldn’t sleep.

“What do you do when you don’t sleep?”

“I bide in the bed.”

“Do you do any work?”

“No, sir.”

“Do you cook?”

“No, sir.”

“Do you wash the children?”

“Scattered times, sir.”

Then the husband put in: “She couldn’t do her work and it overcast her. She overtopped her mind, sir.”

He was a fine, dignified old fellow, and it was a real pleasure to see how tender he was toward his poor fidgety, neurasthenic spouse. She hadn’t any teeth worth mentioning, and her lips were pursed together with a vise-like grip. I shall not forget how Doctor Grenfell murmured to me in a humorous aside: “Teeth certainly do add to a lady’s charm!”

When medicine is administered, it is hard to persuade the afflicted one that the prescription means just what it says.

This lady was told to take three pills, and she took two. But most of them exceed their instruction. To a woman at Trap Cove Dr. Fox gave liniment for her knee. It helped her. Then she took it internally for a stomach-ache, arguing logically enough that a pain is a pain, a medicine is a medicine, and if this liniment was good for a hurt in the knee it must be good for any bodily affliction. Luckily she lived to tell the tale.

“When I was in the North Sea the sailors if they got the chance ransacked my medicine cupboard and drank up everything they could lay their hands on.” Such autobiographic confessions are often made while the Doctor mixes a draught or concocts a lotion. “Here it is the same way. I have had my customers drain off the whole bottle of medicine at once, on the theory that if one teaspoonful did you good, a bottle would be that much better.” His questions, like his lancet, go right to the root of the trouble. Nothing phases him. He answers every question. He never tells people they are fools; his inexhaustible forebearance with the inept and the obtuse is not the least Christlike of his attributes.

It is difficult for these men to come to the hospital in summer, for their livelihood depends on their catch, and then on their salting and spreading the fish: and after the cod-fishery has fallen away to zero the herring come in October, and the cod to some extent return with them.

“When I tell them they must go to the hospital, they always say ‘I haven’t time: I want to stay and mind my traps.’”

The Doctor hates above all things—as I have indicated—to leave a wound open, or a malady half-treated, and hustle on. It is the great drawback and exasperation in his work that the interval before he sees the patient again must be so long. He mourns whenever he has to pull a tooth that might be saved if he could wait to fill it.

He is always working against time, against the sea, against ignorance, against a want of charity on the part of nominal Christians who ought to help him instead of carping and denouncing.

But he is working with all honest and sincere men, all who are true to the high priesthood of science, all who are on the side of the angels.

One man thus describes his affliction, letting the Doctor draw his own deductions:

“Like a little round ball the pain will start, sir; then it will full me inside; and the only rest I get is to crumple meself down.”

An unhappy woman reciting the history of her complaint declared: “The last doctor said I had an impression of the stomach and was full of glams.”

“Bless God!” exclaimed another, speaking of her children. “There’s nothing the matter with ’em. They be’s off carrying wood. They just coughs and heaves, that’s all.”

One mother, asked what treatment she was administering to her infant replied: “Oh, I give ’er nothing now. Just plenty of cold water and salts and spruce beer; ne’er drop o’ grease.”

When there is no doctor to be had the services of the seventh son of a seventh son are in demand.

Elemental human misery made itself heard in the dolorous accents of a corpulent lady of fifty. “I works in punishment on account of my eyes. Sometimes I piles two or three fish on top of each other and I has to do it over. I cries a good deal about it.” Her gratification as she was fitted to a pair of “plus” glasses that greatly improved her sight was worth a long journey to witness. Many pairs of glasses were put on her nose en route to the discovery of the most satisfactory pair, and each time she would say “Lovely! Beautiful!” with crescendo of fervour.

I heard a fond father tell the Doctor that there was a “rale squick (real squeak) bawling on the inside of” his offspring.

A man who climbed down the companion way with an aching side, a rupture, and a hypertrophic growth on his finger, was asked what he did for his ribs.

“I rinsed them,” was the response.

The Doctor is always on the lookout for the “first flag of warning”—as he calls it—of the dreaded “T. B.” which is responsible for one death in every four in Newfoundland. Much of his talk with a patient has to do with fresh air and fresh vegetables. The Eskimoes may know better than some native Newfoundlanders. “I like air. I push my whiphandle through the roof,” said one of the Eskimoes.

Here is a typical excerpt, from a conversation with a young man who to the layman looked very robust.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-two, sir.”

“Have any in your family had tuberculosis?”

“Father’s brother Will and Aunt Clarissa died of it, sir.”

“Are you suffering?”

“It shoots up all through my stomach, sir.”

“Do you read and write?”

“No, Doctor.”

“See clearly?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“Are you able to get any greens?”

“Sometimes, sir.”

“Dock-leaves?”

“No, sir.”

“What greens have you?”

“Alexander greens, sir.”

“Any berries?”

“Yes, Doctor. And bake apples.”

“That’s good. You must eat plenty of them. You must have good food. As good as you can afford. I’m sorry it’s so hard where you live to get anything fresh. Do you sleep well?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“Anybody else sleep in the same bed?”

“No, Doctor.”

“When you go to bed do you keep the windows open?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“That’s right. That’s very important. Do people spit around you?” (The Doctor is always on the war-path against this disgusting and dangerous habit.)

“No, sir.”

“Quite sure?”

“Well, we use spit-boxes.”

“Do you burn the contents?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you wear warm things?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“Sweat a lot?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“You mustn’t get wet without changing your clothes. Now, when you eat potatoes I want you to eat them baked, with the skins on. I don’t mean eat the skins. But the part right under the skins is very important.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

As one listens to such catechizing it becomes clear that the Doctor lays great stress on fresh air and fresh food as medicines, “Cold is your friend and heat is your enemy” is his oft-reiterated dictum to consumptives.

Once he said to me, “I attach great importance to the sun-bath. I believe in exposing the naked body to all it can get of the air.” In the nipping cold of the early morning on the _Strathcona_ I emerged from beneath four double blankets to hear the Doctor joyfully cry: “I’ve just had my bucket on deck. You could have had one too, but I lost the bucket overboard.” It has been a pastime of his to row with a boatload of doctors and nurses to an iceberg and go in swimming from the platform at the base of the berg.

Sometimes the Macedonian cry comes by letter.

Here is a pencilled missive from an old woman who evidently got a kindly neighbour to write it for her, for the signature is misspelled:

“Pleas ducker grandlield would you help me with a little clothing I am a wodow 85 yars of age.”

“Grandlield” is not further from the name than a great many have come. Here are some other common variants:

Gumpin
Grinpiel
Greenfield
Gramfull
Gremple
Gransfield

From a village in White Bay, where the fishing was woefully poor in 1919, comes this pathetic plea:

“To Dr. and Mrs. Grenfell: Dear Friends: I am writing to see if you will help me a little.—My husband got about 1 qtl of fish (1 quintal—pronounced kental—of 112 pounds, worth at most $11.20) this summer, and I have four children, 15, 13, 11, 6 years, and his Father, and we are all naked as birds with no ways or means to get anything. What can I do; if you can do anything for me I hope God will bless you. It is pretty hard to look at a house full of naked children.”

Mrs. Grenfell visited White Bay in July and in two villages found a number of people all but utterly destitute. They were living on “loaf” (bread) and tea. They had icefields instead of fish. Six of the breadwinners got a job at St. Anthony. The villagers had few pairs of shoes among them, In several instances the foot-gear was fashioned of the sides of rubber boots tied over the feet with pieces of string. The people of this neighbourhood are folk of the highest character, and richly deserving, though poverty-stricken.

Another characteristic letter:

“Dr. dear sir. please send two roals fielt (rolls of felt) one Roal Ruber Hide (rubberoid) one ten Patent for Paenting Moter Boat some glass for the bearn (barn) thanks veary mutch for the food you sent me. Glad two have James Home and his Leg so well you made a splended Cut of it this time I will all way Pray for you while I Live Potatoes growing well on the Farm Large Enough two Eaght all redey. But I loast my Cabbages Plants wit the Big falls rain and snow i the first of the summer, but I have lotes of turnips Plants I have all the Caplen (a small fish) I wants two Put on the farm this summer.

“dr—dear sir I want some nails to finesh the farm fance I farn.”

In a fisherman’s house in an interval between examinations of children for tonsils and adenoids the Doctor related this incident to a spellbound group. He never has any trouble holding an audience with stories that grow out of his work, and the fishermen delight as he does in his informal chats with them and with their families.

“We had a long hunt for a starving family of which we had been told by the Hudson Bay Company agent, on an island at Hamilton Inlet in Labrador. The father was half Eskimo. He had a single-barrelled shotgun with which he had brought down one gull. With his wife and his five naked children he was living under a sail. The children, though they had nothing on, were blue in the face with eating the blueberries, and they were fat as butter. The mate took two of the little ones, as if they were codfish, one under each arm, and carried them aboard. There were tears in his eyes, for he had seven little ones of his own, and he was very fond of children. Both were carefully brought up at our Childrens’ Home and one of them, who can now both read and write, is aboard at present as a member of the crew of the _Strathcona_.”

After evening prayers on Sunday, at which the Doctor has spoken, he has treated as many as forty persons.

In one place after removing a man’s tonsils it was a case of eyeglasses to be fitted, then came one who clamoured to have three teeth extracted. The teeth were “hauled” and a bad condition of ankylosis at the roots was revealed. Then a girl had a throat abscess lanced, and she was followed by a boy with a dubious rash and a tubercular inheritance. The Doctor is ever on the lookout for the “New World” smallpox: but the stethoscope detected a pleuritic attack, and strong supporting bandages were wound about the lower part of his chest.

Another group was this:

1. An operation on a child’s tonsils. A local anaesthetic was given—10 per cent. cocaine. A tooth was also removed. The total charge was $1.00.

2. A fisherman came for ointments—zinc oxide and carbolic.

3. An eight months old infant was brought in, blind in the right eye. This condition might have been obviated had boric acid been applied at the time of the baby’s birth. The mother said that only a little warm water had been used.

So many, though they may not say so, appear to believe with Mary when she said to Jesus, “Lord, if thou hadst been here my brother had not died.” They think the Doctor has something like supernatural powers.

With the utmost care he prepared to administer novocaine and treat the wound of a man who had run a splinter into his left hand between the first and second fingers, leaving an unhealed sinus. “Wonderful stuff, this novocaine!” he remarked, as he put on a pair of rubber gloves, washed them in alcohol, and then gave his knives a bath in a soup-plate of alcohol.

“In the inflamed parts none of these local anaesthetics work very well,” was his next comment.

But the patient scarcely felt it when he ran a probe through the hand till it all but protruded through the skin on the inner side.

The bad blood was spooned out, and then the deep cavity swallowed about six inches of iodoform gauze. When the wound had been carefully packed the hand was bandaged. For nearly an hour’s work requiring the exercise of rare skill and the utmost caution the charge was—a dollar. And that included a pair of canvas gloves and another pair of rubber mitts, of the Doctor’s own devising, drawn over the bandages and tied so that the man might continue at his work without getting salt-water or any contaminating substance in the wound and so infecting it badly.

These two importunate telegrams arrived while he was paying a flying visit to headquarters at St. Anthony:

“Do your best to come and operate me I have an abscess under
right tonsil will give you coal for your steamer am getting
pretty weak.

Capt. J. N. Coté, Long Point.”

A second telegram arriving almost simultaneously from the same man read: “Please come as fast as you can to operate me in the throat and save my life.”

Captain Coté is the keeper of the Greenly Island Lighthouse, near Blanc Sablon. It is a very important station.

The Doctor, true to form, at once made up his mind to go. Greenly Island is about 100 miles from St. Anthony, and on the opposite side of the Straits, on the Canadian side of the line that divides Canadian Labrador from Newfoundland Labrador. The short cut took us through Carpoon (Quirpon) Tickle, and there we spent the night, for much as the Doctor wanted to push ahead the wind made the Strait so rough that—having it against us—the _Strathcona_ could not have made headway. “I remember,” said the Doctor with a smile, “that once we steamed all night in Bonavista Bay, full speed ahead, and in the morning found ourselves exactly where we were the night before. Coal is too scarce now.” On one occasion the _Strathcona_ distinguished herself by going ashore with all sails set.

By the earliest light of morning we were under way. The tendency of a land-lubber at the wheel off this cruel coast was naturally to give the jagged and fearsome spines of rock as wide a berth as possible. In the blue distance might be seen a number of bergs, large and small, just as a reminder of what the ice can do to navigation when it chooses; and in the foreground were fishermen’s skiffs bobbing about and taking their chances of crossing the track of our doughty little steamer. But the Doctor called in at the door of the wheelhouse: “Run her so close to those rocks that you almost skin her!” He was thinking not of his ship, not of himself, but of the necessity of getting to the lonely lighthouse-keeper at the earliest possible moment, to perform that operation for a subtonsillar abscess. There was a picture in his mind of the valiant French Canadian engineer gasping for breath as the orifice dwindled, and now he was burning not the firewood but coal—a semi-precious stone in these waters in this year of grace. The _Strathcona_ labours and staggers; Fritz the dog goes to the bowsprit and sniffs the sun by day and the moon by night; the ship is carrying all the bellying sails she has; and the Doctor mounts to the crow’s-nest to make sure that his beloved new topsail is doing its full share. He tools the _Strathcona_—when he is at the wheel—as if she were a taxicab. So the long diagonal across the Strait is cut down, seething mile by mile, till between Flower’s Cove and Forteau—where the Strait is at the narrowest, and the shores are nine miles and three-quarters apart—it almost seems as if an hour’s swim on either hand would take one to the eternal crags where the iris blows and the buttercup spreads her cloth of gold.

We drew near Blanc Sablon (pronounced Sablow) with Grant’s Wharf by the river. West of that river for several hundred yards it is no man’s land between the two Labradors—that is to say, between Canada and Newfoundland. A man stood up in a jouncing power-boat and waved an oar, and then—his overcoat buttoned up to his ears—our patient, Captain Coté, stood up beside him. They had come out to meet us to save every moment of precious time. It was a weak and pale and shaky man that came aboard—but he was a man every bit of him, and he did not wince when the Doctor, in the crypt-like gloom of the _Strathcona’s_ saloon, while the tin lamp was held in front of the Captain’s mouth, reached into the throat with his attenuated tongs and scissors and made the necessary incision after giving him several doses of the novocaine solution as a local anaesthetic.

“Then the Captain sat back white and gasping on the settle, and—with a strong Canadian French flavour in his speech—told us a little of his lonely vigil of the summer.

“In eighteen days, Doctor, I never saw a ship for the fog: but I kept the light burning—two thousand gallons of kerosene she took.

“All summer long it was fog—fog—fog. I show you by the book I keep. Ever since the ice went out we have the fog. Five days we have in July when it was clear—but never such a clear day as we have now. Come ashore with me on Greenly Island and you shall have the only motor car ride it would be possible for you to have in Labrador.”

We accepted the invitation. At the head of the wharf were men spreading the fish to dry—grey-white acres of them on the flakes like a field of everlastings. In the lee of a hill they had a few potato-plants, fenced away from the dogs. In a dwelling house with “Please wipe your feet” chalked on the door we found a spotless kitchen and two fresh-cheeked, white-aproned women cooking. It was a fine thing to know that they were upholding so high a standard of cleanliness and sanitation in that lonely outpost—as faithful as the keeper of the light in his storm-defying tower.

From the fish-flakes of the ancient “room” over half a mile of cinderpath and planking we rode on the chassis of a Ford car, which the keeper uses to convey supplies.

“The first joy-ride I ever had in Labrador,” said the Doctor, and the Captain grinned and let out another link to the roaring wind that flattened the grass and threatened to lift his cabbage-plants out of their paddock under his white housewalls.

Safe in his living-room, with wife and children, two violins, a talking-machine, an ancient Underwood typewriter and even a telephone that connected him with the wharf, Captain Coté pulled out his wallet, selected three ten-dollar bills and offered them to the Doctor, saying: “I will pay you as much more as you like.”

Dr. Grenfell took one of the bills, saying, “That will be enough.”

The Captain, mindful of his promise about the coal, said, “How much coal do you want?”

“On the understanding that the Canadian Government supplies it,” answered the Doctor, “I will let you put aboard the _Strathcona_ just the amount we used in coming here—5½ tons.”

The Captain went to the telephone and talked with a man at the wharf. Then he turned away from the transmitter and said: “He tells me that he can’t put the coal on board today, because it would blow away while they were taking it out to the _Strathcona_ on the skiff. We have no sacks to put it in.”

“Very well,” returned the Doctor, “when it’s convenient you might store it at Forteau. They will need it there this winter at Sister Bailey’s nursing station.” Then he dismissed the subject of the fee and the fuel-supply to tell us how pleased he was to find that Mackenzie King, author of “Industry and Humanity,” had become the Liberal leader in Canada. King is a Harvard Doctor of Philosophy, a man of thought and action of the type by nature and training in sympathy with Grenfell’s work. It is a great thing for Canada that a man of his calibre and scholarly distinction has been raised to the place he holds.

From the site of the lighthouse there are observed most singular wide shelves of smooth brown rock presenting their edges to the fury of the surf, and over the broad brown expanse are scattered huge boulders that look as though the Druids who left the memorials at Stonehenge might have put them there. Captain Coté said the winter ice-pack tossed these great stones about as if it were a child’s game with marbles.

A happy man he thought himself to have his children with him. The lighthouse-keeper at Belle Isle lost six of his family on their way to join him; another at Flower’s Cove lost five. As a remorseless graveyard of the deep the region is a rival of the dreaded Sable Island off Newfoundland’s south shore.

A wire rope indicates the pathway of two hundred yards between the light and the foghorn: and in winter the way could not be found without it. The foghorn gave a solo performance for our benefit, at the instigation of either member of a pair of Fairbanks-Morse 15 horse-power gasoline engines. We were ten feet from it, but it can be heard ten miles and more.

A “keeper of the light” like Captain Coté, or Peter Bourque, who tended the Bird Rock beacon for twenty-eight years, is a man after Grenfell’s own heart. For Grenfell himself lets his light shine before men, and knows the need of keeping the flame lambent and bright, through thick and thin.