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.