The War Story

We are apt to forget how intimately the Army and the Army Medical Service are associated with the medical history of the Dominion. But so it is. For sixty years and more after the conquest, Canada was too poor and too thinly populated to be able to establish and support medical schools, or to attract well-trained doctors, either from the old country or from the States to the south. As a result, the surgeons who came over with the British regiments found their services in such request that many of them elected to remain when their regiments were recalled, and in all the older centres of population we meet with the same story: these old Army doctors became the recognized heads and leaders of the profession. Their connection with the Service gave them an immediate standing in the young community. They brought with them the old-world ideals of professional conduct, ideals strengthened, and indeed raised, by their military training and associations; and, as Major-General Fotheringham has well pointed out, it is largely owing to their influence that Canada has escaped the haphazard legislation, defective training and irregular medical practice which have cursed so many of the States of the Union to the south. When at last the population had increased sufficiently to maintain and justify the establishment of medical schools, we find that in Lower Canada two out of the four founders of the General Hospital and of the Medical School which in a few years became the Medical Faculty of College, were old Army doctors; that another Army surgeon, Widmer, "scrupulously punctilious, and in every detail regardless of the proprieties of life," was the father of the profession in Upper Canada; a man of the very highest character, who did more than anyone else to promote the progress of the profession in what is now Ontario. Similarly in Acadia it was the old Army doctors, who came along with the ship-loads of loyalist fugitives from the south, and formed the mainstay of the profession, while later, the British regiments at Halifax and elsewhere provided for two generations the foremost practitioners of Nova Scotia, and of New Brunswick, when this was separated as a distinct province.

It is difficult for us, after fifty years of confederation, to realize that before that event there was no Canada proper, but a collection of separate provinces, which with difficulty had obtained something more than the status of Crown Colonies. So long as the Mother Country with its troops garrisoned and protected these, there was no urgent need for provincial militia. Militia regiments there were, it is true, here and there, but these existed more for ceremonial than for practical purposes; and their medical organization was the outgrowth of pre-Napoleonic conditions, when the regimental medical officer was still looked upon, along with the chaplain, as, if not the servant, certainly the nominee of the colonel of the regiment. Organized medical service was wholly wanting.