Hazelton Men in World War One - an Account

Over a hundred men from the Hazelton District served during World War One. Many went overseas. Sergeant Jack Bennett from Hazelton was at the battle at Vimy Ridge. Wounded—this was his third wound, the first being from Hill 160 and the second from Zillebeker, he wrote from Seaford Hospital in Sussex to his friend Jack Frost. He survived the war.
“That was some show on the 9th. It was the last thing in shell-fire which our boys put up; some contrast to Festubert, I can tell you. Our guns had been giving it them at intervals for nearly a week, but the final three minutes before we went over was terrific; it nearly takes my breath away when I think of it. We crept out into no-man’s-land the night before and dug in our kicking-off trench. We were well dug in by day break, then we waited for the final moment to come. We did not have long to wait. At 5.27 the guns opened up as one. It was to be a three-minute preparation and then the barrage was to creep forward over his second and third lines and we were to climb over and follow. Three minutes don’t seem long for a bombardment, but it did the work alright for there were not many Huns left in his front line or much of his second line either. The survivors were game though and did their best. I had the pleasure of lobbing a bomb between two of them who were still firing at us as we approached. It sure closed them up. I had a bit of good shooting with my rifle after we had passed the front line. They could be seen getting away in bunches of from three to a dozen in the haze of smoke, but not many got away, for our barrage was dropping almost like a wall of fire and smoke and fire ahead of them. We got to our first objective in a very short time and it was here I got pinked over. After the fury had passed on I got a stick and with the aid of it hobbled back to the rear. It was a great start for the first day and I thought we were going to bust right through but Fritz is a very tough proposition to break up. I am now a grenade instructor here, just temporary of course, but I am going to hang on as long as I can and show the young bloods how to wield the grenade.” (Omineca Herald)

Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) - Health Care Reformer.

The idea that governments had a responsibility to provide some form of health care is an old one. Although the idea did not begin to gain traction in Europe until the eighteen-fifties changes in Germany, the debate goes back to the Muslim physicians. An early contributor to the debate in the West was Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), better known as the author of Gulliver’s Travels.
In 1697 Defoe published “An Essay Upon Projects.” In this he proposed a number of practical, well-thought-out measures to improve public health. His ideas for societies of people each contributing money to pay for health care became the basis for the Friendly Societies, which were the premier health care organizations until the Lloyd George reforms of 1912. After describing the use of insurance in the shipping business and in the fire prevention business, Defoe goes on to say, “Another branch of insurance is by contribution, or (to borrow another term from that before mentioned friendly societies), in short, a number of people entering into a mutual compact to help one another in case any disaster or illness befall them.”
He then describes how these contributions could be used to help people deal with health calamities and old age, based on people contributing to a common fund. Although he worked out funding schemes in some detail, he seems to have stopped a little short of advocating government compulsion or government funding.

Did Dr. Wrinch and Emily Carr meet?

Emily Carr is British Columbia’s most famous artist. She is known for her paintings of the dark forests and totem poles of the North. She came to the Hazelton district twice. Did she and Horace meet? What would they have made of each other? Could she, perhaps, have hurt her knee clambering over rocks or caught a chill in the rains at Kispiox, and come to the doctor for a remedy? Neither Horace nor the Omineca Herald mention such a meeting. I have searched long and hard, without success, to find any evidence that they actually did meet.
The first time she visited Hazelton was in 1912. She came up on the Skeena and went down to Kitsegukla on the Inlander on one of the last voyages before the railway made stern-wheelers obsolete. While at Hazelton she visited Hagwilget and went up to Kispiox, where she stayed with the missionary there.
She came again in 1928. This time she was more self-sufficient and came accompanied only by her dog Ginger Pop, a six-pound dog that reportedly terrified the local mastiffs. She visited Kitwancool, although having being warned it was still too dangerous for non-indigenous people. There she was fascinated with the totem poles there, especially, we are told, the one the with the hole in it.
Although Carr wrote that she did not like missionaries (she grew up in a religious home, and her sister was very pious) she did have introductions to them and on occasion stayed with them on her travels. Could she have stayed with Horace? No evidence shows this, although it may have been logical. She may well have known Horace’s artist sister, Mary Wrinch, perhaps having met her when she was in Toronto. She probably would have heard of her. Mary was a noted painter in Ontario, a member of Ontario’s art establishment and a female pioneer in a man’s world. She and Carr had mutual friends in members of the Group of Seven. On a few rare occasions, they had work in the same exhibition. They had both studied in London at much the same time, though not at the same school.

Dr. Albert Henderson Wallace

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.

Early Public Health Schemes - John Bellers

John Bellers (1654-1725) was an influential Quaker in late Stuart England. Among his close friends was William Penn, the founder of the State of Pennsylvania. Like Chamberlen and in every way as prolific in his ideas, Bellers published many proposals for the public good.
In 1714 he published “An Essay Towards the Improvement of Physick in Twelve Proposals, By which the Lives of many Thousands of the Rich as well as of the Poor may be Saved Yearly.” In this he set out a number of proposals that amounted to a publicly funded national health scheme. He advocated, for instance, not only for the building of hospitals for the poor at or near London and at the two universities (Oxford and Cambridge), but also for the building of specialist hospitals for the blind, the insane and the poor (Articles I, III and VI), a public medical research centre (Proposal V), a publicly paid doctor in every parish (Article VII) and a better information system for the distribution of medical knowledge (Article X).
Bellers also proposed that physicians and surgeons should be sent to the East and West Indies and to the Americas to “seek what may be found useful among the Indians and Negroes.” He suggested that ships’ doctors should be instructed to make such discoveries of new medicines as they could. In support of this idea, he noted that many valuable remedies had already been found abroad. “It is not to be doubted that there are many others yet unknown to Europe.” He credits Negroes with having excellent remedies for the “dry gripes” [influenza]. “An account,” he writes, “of any foreign plants, or insects, are not only a pretty amusement to botanists and natural historians, but may be very needful to be brought hither in order to have their medicinal virtue come to be better understood”.
Perhaps not coincidentally, in 1713 William Penn was instrumental in the opening of almshouses for the sick in Philadelphia. Also in Philadelphia, in 1751 Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Bond founded the first incorporated hospital in the American colonies.

Dr. Malcolm MacEachern - Mr. Hospital.

“Everything we do must be with the patient in mind,” Dr. Malcom MacEachern wrote. “The patient is the sole reason for the existence of the medical profession and hospitals.”
Malcom T. MacEachern (1881–1956) is one of the totem figures in the history of North American hospital administration. Born in Argyle, Ontario, he has been described as a “world figure in the hospital field” and “the Founder of Modern Hospital Administration”. Like Alice Wrinch and Jessie MacKenzie (a contemporary and Ladies Superintendent at Royal Jubilee Hospital in Victoria), he was a schoolteacher before he turned to medicine. His career in the United States was stellar. He was President of the American Hospital Association (1924-1925), Associate Director of the American College of Surgeons and the writer of a thousand page manual of Hospital Administration—Hospital Organization and Management. When he died in 1956 he was lauded as “Mr. Hospital.”
Less well known are years MacEachern spent in British Columbia, where he built a reputation as an important reformer. From 1913 to 1923, when he left to go to the United States, he was General Superintendent of Vancouver General Hospital. In 1918 guided the hospital through the Spanish Flu pandemic. He had been an active member of the American Hospital Association since 1915, an organization of which Dr. Horace Wrinch had been a member since 1908. His experience there and his knowledge of how such an organization improved hospital standards led him, together with others, including Dr.Wrinch and Jessie MacKenzie from Royal Jubilee Hospital in Victoria, to set up the British Columbia Hospital Association in 1917 or early in 1918. MacEachern was its first President, serving for two terms. Dr. Wrinch succeeded him as President for two terms. MacEachern was also instrumental in standardizing nurses’ training in the province and in the establishment of the nursing program at the University of British Columbia. He also pioneered the system of medical case records at VGH and promoted the use of it throughout all BC hospitals.
He left British Columbia in 1923 to be a bigger fish in a larger pond. “The contribution made by Dr. MacEachern by his originating program of the American College of Surgeons,” his obituary said “has no parallel in hospital history.”
A worthy son of Argyle, Ontario.