Adventure yarn rewrote the story of health care in Newfoundland
The saga of a missionary doctor stranded on an ice floe captivated so many that Wilfred Grenfell was able to fundraise off it for years, opening up medicine in what was then a remote British colony.
It was Easter of 1908 and a British doctor travelling by dogsled to operate on a boy in rural Newfoundland was in the worst possible trouble, drifting out to sea on a chunk of ice.
Dr. Wilfred Grenfell had journeyed more than 30 kilometres on Easter Sunday, stopping overnight and setting out again the next morning. To shorten his trip, he cut across the ice of Hope Bay.
But conditions had changed overnight. The ice was turning to slush, grabbing at his dogsled “like treacle,” and Grenfell knew he had to cross broken ice chunks to get back to land.
He and his eight dogs plunged into the water and clambered onto a solid piece of ice, but it was too small to hold them. They swam 20 metres in the freezing North Atlantic to a bigger chunk, losing one dog on the way.
But Grenfell soon realized that as he made his way from chunk to chunk, all the ice was being blown out to sea faster than he could travel toward land. He was staring death in the face, and he knew it.
Yet somehow the British doctor survived and published the story a year later in a popular short book with the title Adrift on an Ice Pan. He didn’t hold back in the tale of survival.
His wet hands went numb early on. Knowing he would soon freeze, he stabbed three of his dogs with a knife, holding their throats to stop them from barking, and wrapped himself in their skins. (One of the dying dogs bit him hard in the leg.)
He assembled their frozen legs into a small flagpole and set a piece of flannel on it to flap and attract attention. Then he sat in his bloody coat of dog skin and waited, praying that someone in a boat would see him.
Grenfell tells the story in the heroic tradition of Victorian adventure stories for boys, like this:
“There, immense pans of Arctic ice, surging to and fro in the heavy ground seas, were thundering into the cliffs like medieval battering rams. It was evident that, even if seen (by someone on shore), I could hope for no help from the quarter before night. No boat could live through the surf.”
Finally, after he had considered suicide, rescuers arrived in a boat. “As the man in the bow leaped from the boat on to my ice raft and grasped both my hands in his, not a word was uttered. I could see in his face the strong emotions he was trying hard to force back, though in spite of himself tears trickled down his cheeks. It was the same with each of the others of my rescuers, nor was there any reason to be ashamed of them.” His rescuers were five men “with Newfoundland muscles in their backs, and five as brave hearts as ever beat in the bodies of human beings.” They gave him warm tea and rowed him to safety.
The superhuman doctor even concludes the story by operating on the sick boy two days later. (This time a boat brought the child to hospital, a much more workable solution.)
It was undoubtedly a tale of high drama, but for Grenfell — and for the people of northern Newfoundland and Labrador — it played a larger role. Grenfell was helping to transform health care in the region. This story, and the way Grenfell told and retold it, brought him fame that opened doors to people with money.
Dr. Jim Connor of Memorial University of Newfoundland sees this episode as central in building Grenfell’s reputation, in fascinating audiences both in Canada and abroad, who then helped him build a health-care network where none had existed before.
“It became a true-life adventure tale which he got a lot of mileage out of,” Connor says. “Let’s just say he told it with enthusiasm. It’s the adventure of the North, the danger of the North, it’s dogsleds, it’s muscular Christianity … it had all the elements.”
Grenfell was a self-promoter, “a very charismatic speaker. He had lantern slide shows. He was in his own way kind of a sexy guy: wiry, muscular, athletic, he was a doctor, he was charming. And he was a good orator. He came from a certain evangelical background too where it was good news and he knew how to work an audience.”
Grenfell first arrived in Newfoundland and Labrador in 1892, a general practitioner sent as a medical missionary by a British religious charity called the Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen.
But he was ambitious, and saw an opportunity to build something bigger, to help fishing communities on a scale far larger than one travelling doctor could ever do. In 1907, the Grenfell Association of America and England was formed. In 1914, the association was incorporated in Canada as the International Grenfell Association.
Along the way, he started to approach medical colleges in the big cities of the northeastern United States. “He manages to tap into a lot of the Ivy League universities, and gets a constant supply of young men and women going up to the Labrador, up to Newfoundland, as a summer adventure,” Connor says. “It’s almost the Peace Corps of the 1960s.”
It seems incredible today that a country doctor from a little-known British colony off the Canadian coast would walk into Harvard or Yale and get free doctors, medical students and money — not just once, but on and on.
“But that was the spirit of the time,” Connor says. “There was a thing called the Student Christian Movement and the Student Volunteer Movement where students — it was like the 1960s and 1970s, with Katimavik and so on. You could do something useful with your summers other than just lolling around.
“He got all these high-end Ivy League guys digging ditches and building hospitals.” The attraction for students: “It was muscular Christianity, it was masculine, but it was also something constructive to do. So it actually wasn’t that much of a tough sell.”
It also helped that Grenfell made himself an instant connection with the right element of American society when he married Anna Mac Clanahan, from a well-to-do family.
His medical mission ran from before the First World War until Grenfell died in 1940.
His main base hospital was in St. Anthony, at the northern tip of Newfoundland. “From there you would also get hospital boats, floating clinics, that would go around the Labrador coast,” explains Connor. “Also he had other satellite hospitals and nursing stations up the Labrador coast, so he really had quite a network going on.”
But buildings were only half the story.
He brought “a lot of physicians, who were well-established guys from the U.S. Northeast and elsewhere. They would come up for the summer. They were specialists: They were ophthalmologists, they were dentists, they were surgeons that would come up and give their time in the summer. They also managed to get a fair bit of salmon-fishing in as well, so there was something in it for them, but they would give their time. He really had a corps of volunteers that he could rely on, and some of these guys would come back five, 10, 15 years.
“The curious thing is that many of these physicians came from Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Yale Medical School. So this kind of isolated area got some of the most advanced and best-trained surgeons. They were in many ways better off than St. John’s, the capital. So it’s an irony that one of the most isolated places got some of the best medical care.
“It really was a family affair. A lot of the children get care that they would never get under ordinary conditions.
“Grenfell was a big name during his own time,” Connor says, but today the man is less well-known.
“He is kind of a curious character now in our post-colonial world. He was a very strong man, charismatic, and that kind of character goes out of fashion.”
Historian Ronald Rompkey writes in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography that a memorial plaque in St. Anthony commemorates Grenfell’s life “without any conventional Christian iconography or sentimental language, giving only a name, a date, and an inscription, ‘Life is a Field of Honour.’ Grenfell was one of the last of the spiritual adventurers, the manly Christians who carried the code of service into the remote places of the Earth at a time when such a philosophy of life was still possible.”
It’s the adventure of the North, the danger of the North, it’s dogsleds, it’s muscular Christianity … it had all the elements.