“DOCTOR.”
III
AT ST. ANTHONY
Next evening found us at St. Anthony. Doctors and nurses were on the wharf to greet their chief after his absence of several weeks. Dr. Curtis showed the stranger through the clean and well-appointed hospital, with its piazza for a sun-bath and the bonny air for the T. B. patients, its X-ray apparatus and its operating room, its small museum of souvenirs of remarkable operations. I saw Dr. Andrews of San Francisco perform with singular deftness an operation for congenital cataract, with a docile little girl who had been blind a long time, and whose sight would probably be completely restored by the two thrusts made with a needle at the sides of the cornea. Her eyes were bandaged and she was carried away by the nurse, broadly smiling, to await the outcome. For ten years or so this noted oculist, no longer young except in the spirit, has crossed the continent to spend the summer in volunteer service at St. Anthony—a fair type of the men that are naturally drawn to the work in which the Doctor found his life.
One of the St. Anthony doctors visiting out-patients came upon a woman who was carefully wrapped in paper. This explanation was offered: “If us didn’t use he, the bugs would lodge their paws in we.” “Bugs” are flies, and the use of “he” for “it” is characteristic. A skipper will talk about a lighthouse as he, just as he feminizes a ship, and the nominative case serves also as the objective.
Another woman had been wrapped by her neighbours in burnt butter and oakum. “Now give her a bath,” was Dr. Grenfell’s advice after he had made his examination. “You can if you like, Doctor,” the volunteer nurse said. “If you do it and she dies we shan’t be blamed.”
In the hospital the Doctor was concerned with a baby twelve months old whose feet were twisted over till they were almost upside down. The mother had massaged the feet with oil for hours at a time. The baby cried constantly with pain, and neither the child nor the mother had known a satisfactory night’s rest since it was born. When the Doctor said the condition was curable, because she had brought her child in time, the look of relief in the mother’s face defied recording. It is a look often seen with his patients, and since he scarcely ever asks or receives a fee worth mentioning, it constitutes a large part of his reward.
The herd of reindeer that the Doctor imported from Lapland and installed between St. Anthony and Flower’s Cove with two Lapp herders are now flourishing under Canadian auspices in (Canadian) Labrador in the vicinity of the St. Augustine River. The Doctor himself took a hand in the difficult job of lassoing them and tying their feet, and still there were about forty of the animals that could not be found. The Doctor says it was “lots of fun” catching them—but he gives that description to many transactions that most of us would consider the hardest kind of hard work.
Next in importance after the hospital, Exhibit A is the spick-and-span orphanage, with thirty-five of the neatest and sweetest children, polite and friendly and more than willing to learn. The boys who are not named Peter, James or John are named Wilfred. “Suffer little children to come unto me” is in big letters on the front of the building. On the hospital is the inscription: “Faith, hope and love abide, but the greatest of these is love.” Over the Industrial School stands written, “Whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as unto the Lord.” Here the beautiful rugs are made—hooked through canvas—according to lively designs of Eskimoes and seals and polar bears prepared in the main by the Doctor. Even the bird-house has its legend: “Praise the Lord, ye birds of wing.” There is a thriving co-operative store, next door to the well-kept little inn. A sign of the Doctor’s devising and painting swings in front of the store. On one side is a picture of huskies with a komatik (sled) bringing boxes to a settler’s door, and the inscription is, “Spot cash is always the leader.” On the other side of the sign a ship named Spot Cash is seen bravely ploughing through mountainous waves and towering bergs. Underneath it reads: “There’s no sinking her.” “That is a reminiscence,” smiled the Doctor, “of my fights with the traders. Do you think these signs of mine are cant? I don’t mean them that way. I want every one of them to count.”
A school, a laundry, a machine-shop and a big store are other features of the plant at St. Anthony. The dock is a double-decker, and from it a diminutive tramway with a hand-car sends “feeders” to the various buildings and even up the walk to the Doctor’s house. All the mail-boats now turn in at this harbour. The captain of a ship like the Prospero—which in the summer of 1919 brought on four successive trips 70, 70, 60 and 50 patients to overflow the hospital—appreciates the facilities offered by this modern wharfage.