When Dr. Albert Henderson Wallace arrived to work at the Hazelton Hospital in the fall of 1909, he was Dr. Horace Wrinch’s first medical assistant. Even before he had met his new boss, who was out for a week in the mountains tending an injured person, Dr. Wallace had to admit to the Hospital more patients than ever had been admitted before in one day. Soon he himself was out on the trail for ten days, tending to a Gitxsan badly injured by a grizzly.
In 1910, Dr. Wallace left the Hazelton Hospital to open up his own practice in Telkwa. He also intended to open a hospital there. Whether he succeeded in getting one off the ground and in full operation is unclear. He was certainly working on it, and the advertisements in Vancouver papers in boosting Telkwa’s attractions indicated that there was indeed a hospital.
He brought his new wife Louise to Telkwa in October 1911. They had met while he was working at Royal Jubilee in Victoria as a house surgeon.
In April 1914 a ferocious wind-driven fire at Telkwa wiped out thirteen buildings, including Wallace’s building. Louise, fleeing the fire reportedly stepped on an upturned garden rake, and was severely injured. Perhaps, with Louise’s injury and the war, he did not carry on with his hospital project.
In 1916 Wallace joined the Army Medical Corps, being commissioned as a captain with the 13th Canadian Field Ambulance. In 1918 he was wounded at Amiens. His service record says he was “Reported wounded, remaining on duty, on April 24th 1917”. He received an ankle wound (to his Achilles tendon) after a gas shell splintered. Discharged as fit, he returned to Vancouver in December 1918.
In February 1919 it was reported that he had been awarded the Military Cross for conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty. Apparently, while in charge of five stretcher squads he followed a battalion into action and established assembling posts for the wounded, thus enabling the wounded to be brought out quickly. Visiting Vancouver in October of 1919, the Prince of Wales made the presentation.
In 1919 Dr. Wallace returned to Nelson, the town where he had grown up, and joined Dr. Hardin as a partner in his medical practice. A home-town boy, he became very popular, being a curler, a mountaineer, a board member of the local YMCA, a Mason, an Oddfellow and a Scottish Clan member.
Then tragedy soon struck the family. His hard work—he seems to have been a workaholic—exhausted him but he refused to take a break. While hastening on his way to an urgent medical case, his automobile went off the road and he was killed. It was said that his extreme fatigue had overtaken him. He was buried in one of the largest funerals— a full military funeral—in Nelson’s history up to that date. With the city band played the “Dead March in Saul”, his coffin was carried on a gun carriage, followed by many marching contingents and twenty automobiles of mourners. Volleys were fired over his grave. He was thirty-five. He left a widow and three daughters.