It was to these rough waters that Dr. Grenfell came when the need of the folk reached his ears and touched his heart. Before that, in the remoter parts of Newfoundland and on the coast of Labrador there were no doctors. The folk depended for healing upon traditional cures, upon old women who worked charms, upon remedies ingeniously devised to meet the need of the moment, upon deluded persons who prescribed medicines of the most curious description, upon a rough-and-ready surgery of their own, in which the implements of the kitchen and of the splitting-stage served a useful purpose. For example, there was a misled old fellow who set himself up as a healer in a lonely cove of the Newfoundland coast, where he lived a hermit, verily believing, it may be, in the glory of his call and in the blessed efficacy of his ministrations; his cure for consumption—it was a tragic failure, in one case, at least—was a bull’s heart, dried and powdered and administered with faith and regularity. Elsewhere there was a man, stricken with a mortal ailment, who, upon the recommendation of a kindly neighbour, regularly dosed himself with an ill-flavoured liquid obtained by boiling cast-off pulley-blocks in water. There was also a father who most hopefully attempted to cure his little lad of diphtheria by wrapping his throat with a split herring; but, unhappily, as he has said, “the wee feller choked hisself t’ death,” notwithstanding. There was another father—a man of grim, heroic disposition—whose little daughter chanced to freeze her feet to the very bone in midwinter; when he perceived that a surgical operation could no longer be delayed, he cut them off with an axe.
An original preventative of sea-boils—with which the fishermen are cruelly afflicted upon the hands and wrists in raw weather—was evolved by a frowsy-headed old Labradorman of serious parts.
“I never has none,” said he, in the fashion of superior fellows.
“No?”
“Nar a one. No, zur! Not me!”
A glance of interested inquiry elicited no response. It but prolonged a large silence.
“Have you never had a sea-boil?” with the note and sharp glance of incredulity.
“Not me. Not since I got my cure.”
“And what might that cure be?”
“Well, zur,” was the amazing reply, “I cuts my nails on a Monday.”