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“I am convinced that Dr. Wrinch and his determination to bring medical attention and health services to the forgotten Gitxsan population is the reason this upper Skeena area maintains the inclusive and cohesive interaction between aboriginal and settlers that exists here!”
Alice Maitland was the Mayor of Hazelton for 42 years, from 1976 to 2018.
If you had wanted to go by land to the newly-founded hamlet of Hazelton on the Skeena River in 1871 (or anywhere in the Cariboo), you might have been interested in this advertisement in the Victoria Daily Colonist of March 12, 1871. For the Yale to Soda Creek part of your journey, you would, this advertisement promised, be able travel in comfort by road steamer and go then the rest of the way by horse. It looked so easy, so comfortable.
Francis J. Barnard, the business man and later member of Parliament, had bought six of the new road steamers that Robert Thomson of Edinburgh had invented in 1869. These road steamers were a great improvement because they had rubber tires, making for a more comfortable ride. The tires were “soft-vulcanized rubber, twelve inches in width and five inches in thickness” with a chain of steel over it.
The new means of transport was debated in the BC Legislature and most people thought they were a sign of progress. The benefits would undeniably be huge, including the ability to carry huge weights of freight, for a very low cost in only eight days. Trials in Yale on April 19 proved its worth to the entire satisfaction of the owners. Hopes were high. They started to operate the service some days later.
On May 5, 1871, however, the company announced “that there will be a temporary interruption to the road steamer enterprise in the upper country. It was found that the links holding the steel shoes which form the flexible or outer tires, being made of malleable cast iron, will not answer on the rocky roads of the Colony.”
Alas, the truth was that in actual operation on rough BC trails, they broke down. They were soon removed from the highways and byways (actually more like trails and rugged wagon roads) and one was put into operation in a logging operation on English Bay in Vancouver. Four were sent back to Scotland.
Hazelton would have to wait for another forty years for horseless vehicles to arrive.
“My own opinion, if I may express it, is that Indian character does not differ so much from that of the noble Anglo-Saxon as much as some would like to believe. And wherein it does differ, we may sometimes have to look to our laurels that we do not appear in the second place.”
Dr.H.C.Wrinch, in a letter in February,1912 to Rev. A.C. Farrell at the Missions Board in Toronto.
This was a common way of getting around in winter when Dr. Wrinch arrived in Hazelton in 1900. Within a dozen years, cars and trains had arrived and, in little more than twenty years, aeroplanes. (From author’s collection)
Several accounts of the hospital state that at the world’s convention of hospitals in Toronto in September 1931 the Hazelton Hospital (as Wrinch Memorial Hospital was called until renamed after Dr. Wrinch’s death in 1939) was chosen as one of the ten best hospitals in Canada. A nice story, and one that I would like to be true in all particulars. I have not, however, been able to find anything that authenticates it.
What I have found out, though, is that a report in the Omineca Herald of October 14, 1931 did state that at the world’s hospital convention in Toronto in September the Hospital Days celebrations at Hazelton Hospital were mentioned (the paper’s word) among the top ten most successful in Canada. (The first prize was awarded to a hospital in Brantford, Ontario) It is unclear what this competition was, or who awarded the prize. No world’s hospital convention was held in Toronto that year.
The American Hospital Association was, however, holding its thirty-third annual convention in Toronto then and it seems probable that this was the convention being referred to. Dr. Wrinch had been a member of the American Hospital Association since 1908, one of the two members from British Columbia at that time. By chance, because he and his wife May were visiting his son Arthur, who was dangerously ill with typhoid fever, Dr. Wrinch attended this convention and doubtless made his usual useful contribution to discussions. He reported that he did learn there much about new medical procedures and equipment. Could it be that the original story changed over the years?
Horace Wrinch is the man lying down near the young lady with the book.
When Horace introduced a form of health insurance at the Hazelton Hospital in 1907, he was not the first to implement the concept. Nor was Lloyd George in England. Nor was Chancellor Bismarck in Germany. Indeed, a number of European states had some limited form of health insurance schemes even before Bismarck. How to finance public health had in fact been a topic for conversation in medical circles for a long time.
In England, three original thinkers—Hugh Chamberlen, Daniel Defoe and John Bellers—had been contemplating ways to improve public health more than 200 years before.
Hugh Chamberlen is one who should certainly not be forgotten. Not only was he a colourful physician of the late-Stuart and early-Hanoverian periods, he was, more importantly, one of the first to be recorded as proposing public health insurance.
He came from a family of obstetricians, most of whom confusingly were called Hugh or Peter. His great-grandfather was a Huguenot émigré. His grand-uncle, Peter Chamberlen the Elder (1560–1631), a barber–surgeon and “man-midwife,” was surgeon to Queen Anne (James I’s wife) and midwife for Henrietta Maria (Charles I’s wife). He was, therefore, present when the future King Charles II was born. This one is said to have invented the obstetrical forceps, a device the family kept secret for several generations. He was the uncle of the surgeon and obstetrician, Peter Chamberlen the Younger, who was also a social reformer, dreaming up schemes to help the poor, arguing for some form of nationalization and for abolition of the death penalty for theft.
Hugh Chamberlen, grandson of Peter the Younger, thus came from a family of surgeons, obstetricians and independent-minded reformers—some say visionaries. As early as 1668, he was proposing ways to rid London of the plague. In 1670, after a visit to Paris, he published a translation of a book on midwifery that would remain the standard text until the middle of the following century. He was appointed physician-in-ordinary to King Charles II in 1673 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1681. An expert in midwifery, he proposed many projects for alleviating the ordeal of childbirth. That he did not always see eye to eye with the authorities, though, is shown by the fact that the Royal College of Physicians fined him ten pounds for the “illegal and evil” practice of medicine in 1688 on pain of being sent to Newgate Prison.
He gained some renown as one of the doctors who stayed in London during the Great Plague.
Hugh Chamberlen was a man of great imagination and ambition, given to firing off proposals to parliament like fireworks, seemingly whenever he had a good idea. In November 1690, he published the first draft of Dr. Chamberlen’s Proposal to Make England Rich and Happy. While this ambitious project, involving a scheme for a national credit system secured by mortgages on landed property, was too ambitious to work, which it didn’t, his other projects stood a fair chance of improving the happiness of the English people, had they been adopted, which they weren’t.
He also advocated the union of Scotland with England, the election of representative peers to the House of Lords, the institution of compulsory education, the practice of preventive medicine and a scheme of general health insurance.
In 1694 Chamberlen fired off to parliament his ideas on public health. In A Proposal for the Better Securing of Health, Humbly Offered to the Consideration of the Honourable Houses of Parliament, he proposed a scheme to reduce the number of people dying needlessly. He argued that the laws against the sale of bad and adulterated food should be strengthened and strictly enforced and also that streets and houses should be cleaned on a regular basis, “all these being very common causes of Disease and Death.”
He proposed a scheme,
“whereby care may be taken, that all sick, as well poor as rich, shall be advised and visited, when needful, by approved, skillful physicians and surgeons; and furnished with necessary medicines in all diseases, except for the pox, mid-wifery and cutting for the stone, for which last three calamities some small additional allowance may be settled . . .all this for a small yearly certain sum assessed upon each house, not exceeding—for the greatest family, nor under—for the meanest that are not objects of charity, which respective sums shall not be the third part of what is now spent, only in apothecaries’ bills in a healthy year. And for this every individual person of the family, as well as the lodger and servants, as master, mistress and children, shall, when there is occasion, be sufficiently accommodated: whereas many at present miserably perish without the least care.”
Chamberlen laid down fourteen inducements for the “new establishment of physic.” The first was that “to preserve health and save lives is always a public good, but more especially in time of war.” Number seven was that “mountebanks and cheats in physic are found by experience to conduce extremely to the ruin of peoples’ health and loss often of their lives as well as their money.” Number eleven—a very clever one—provided that members of both houses of parliament, with their families, not being householders in town, would be attended free of charge.
The involvement of the State in using taxes to improve public health and the levy of a tax on individuals that would entitle them to medical services were revolutionary ideas indeed. Here was a doctor with progressive ideas of which Horace would have approved.
The ground in front of the Hazelton Hospital was the location for many a social and sporting event in Hazelton. From the picnics to small informal gatherings such as the one in the photograph below, from football matches to tennis parties, it was very much a centre of the Hazelton community. In this photograph, Alice Wrinch is perhaps in the group on the left. On the porch is perhaps Dr. Wrinch’s Newfoundland dog, the one that the Rev. Osterhout gave him in September 1900 and which he used to carry his medical supplies on his weekly journeys from Kispiox into Hazelton. The date is somewhere between 1904 and 1914. (Photo: My own collection)
A curious headline in the Omineca Herald on February 25, 1931, said that, “Dr. Wrinch is Opposed to Good Roads in the North.” The article reported that Horace Wrinch, MLA for the Skeena riding, speaking in the House, had said that, although the proposed road to Alaska would start in his own constituency, provincial interests had to be protected from expenditure on a road that might not be affordable. It was, after all, an American project to link Alaska to the rest of the country by road. He asked the government not to commit the province too far at this stage. The Herald reported him as saying that roads in the North should be long and narrow rather than short and wide. The Herald was not impressed. To advocate long, narrow roads rather than straight, wide roads, it said, would take the roads in the North back to the days of tracks for mule trains. The paper wrote,
“It is not like the doctor to be old-fashioned. In the method of transportation he is not old-fashioned, for does he not drive one of the biggest and fastest cars in the North? A narrow road would not be convenient for him any more than it would be convenient for any one of us. . . . As a road builder Dr. Wrinch cannot be recognized as an unqualified success. It is not his line at all. He is a good doctor and a good politician, in fact there are few better. . . . We would prefer to believe, however, that he has been misreported.”
Indeed he had. Duff Pattullo, a leader of the Opposition in the Legislature and later the Premier, soon made this clear in an interview with the Herald. Horace, he said, had made no such comment in the House. This interview gave rise to the comprehensive headline that said, “If The Tories Did it, it is Wrong Says Mr. Pattullo. Everything is All Wrong.” Pattullo was, the Herald remarked, perhaps not in the best of moods, because it also quoted him as saying, “Not only is the Tolmie government the wicked the province has ever had, but it is weak. It is extravagant. It is secretive. It is ignorant and insolent. It is imbecile.” And, the Herald continued, “if there is anything else that the Leader of the Opposition forgot, the Tolmie government is that too.”