Doctor Olds of Twillingate

To read some history about the fishermen and settlers of Newfoundland is an eye-opening introduction to some of the worst abuses capitalism can impose on workers. To read of volunteer doctors and nurses who gave those poor medical care, and who helped free them from their slave-like dependence on the large fish-processors and lumber companies, is fascinating and not a little inspirational. In this deeply researched and deeply moving account, Gary Saunders has caught the spirit and texture of the people, the wilderness, and those hard times, in their own words. From around 1700 until 1949 Newfoundland/Labrador was a British colony, centered at St Johns Newfoundland and dedicated to logging, Grand Banks fishing, and sealing on the ice-pack. Until 1905 the large companies ruled to maximize their profits, treating the workers pretty much like slaves. Wages were paid in company scrip, not money, under the 'company store' system as in Appallachian coal towns. All supplies and food thus had to be exchanged for the scrip at the company store, with prices set by the company. At the end of a year of grueling work, a family might learn that they owed the company more for their food and fishhooks etc than they had 'earned'. Naturally the companies wasted no money on medical care. Until 1898 there was no - repeat, no - hospital or clinic available to the thousands of sealers, fishermen, hunters, and woodsmen along the northern Newfoundland and Labrador coasts, a crow-flight distance of 3,000 miles or more. There were precious few doctors even in the largest towns. If you got seriously hurt or ill, you were most likely going to die. In 1921-24 Johns Hopkins Hospital built a mission hospital at Twillingate, at the behest of Sir Wilfred Grenfell, whose mission hospital was built around 1900 at St Anthony NF much farther north. Both hospitals drew their staff from volunteers recruited from Hopkins and other leading medical schools. In 1932 my parents, a Hopkins doctor and nurse, were married in the Notre Dame Bay Memorial Hospital (NDBMH) in Twillingate. They had been Hopkins classmates of John Olds and his wife Betty. Like Sir Wilfred, the Olds, and many others, they were drawn by the opportunity to provide (mostly) charity care for the people there. Tuberculosis; rickets, scurvy, and other deficiency diseases, were rampant. Appendicitis was frequently fatal, especially in winter when the ocean froze and land travel was nearly impossible. I have snapshots of my mother doing rounds to outports (outlying villages) by dogsled in winter, and by schooner in summer: as did Dr Olds and many another cinician. Of supplies being pulled over the ice to NDBMH; icebergs in the Bay in August; of 300 men pulling a house on skids across the Bay ice, just as in Annie Proulx' "The Shipping News". Of (mis)adventures on the icepack and along the trails. The hardiness of the folk, their endurance, humor, and courage in the face of poverty and neglect, impress