Chapter
Seven
Perhaps this is the place to mention that we had no medical services near. I suppose there was a Doctor at Canora and at Wadena, the two larger towns; one was approximately thirty miles east, the other about the same distance west of us. But there was no thought of being able to travel there in an emergency – no money for train fare and only one train per day, that going west in the morning and east in the evening. But they were often (one could say “usually”) many hours late, so much so that the standard joke was “C N R stands for CanNot Run”. It would eventually come crawling down the track!
There were several good midwives in the district and they had plenty of practice in their line of work, as the bachelors married one by one, and started raising families. My sister, Nora Churchill, had eleven babies all born in her farm home, and raised nine of them to adulthood.
My mother had the foresight, before leaving England, to take a short course in the art of dispensing Homeopathic medicines; and being a very good practical nurse as well, with a knowledge of first aid, she was fairly well prepared to deal with emergencies which were bound to arise under these primitive conditions. I well remember her little medicine cabinet on the [32] bedroom wall (made by my cousin, Sidney Morphew), well stocked with the tiny vials of Homeopathic medicines. Some of the names were belladonna, nux vomica, arsenicum, calendula, and china. These were all deadly poisons if given in large doses, but in the form of one tiny pilule or two drops in a glassful of water they had the effect of warding off, or even curing, many ailments. One day, a semi-wild cow which Father was attempting to lead ripped his arm open from wrist to elbow with her sharp horn; that was a test of Mother’s skill as a nurse. My brother Eustace was clearing the matted grass from the mower blades, when the horses moved a few inches, thus activating the blades and cutting off the tips of two of his fingers. We carried him on a ladder to the house, as he had fainted at the sight of all that blood. Poor Mother! She might well have been the one to faint, but she stood up well to the ordeal, replaced the fingers, disinfected the cuts with permanganate of potash (a real standby), and cared for the hand until it was as good as new.
The roads were built by farmers working out part of their municipal taxes in this way. One year, when there was an exceptional amount of rain with the sloughs full of water, my Father and Eustace were with the road-gang building a grade across a slough, working up to their waists in water. It was still early spring, and cold. Not long after that my brother became very ill with a high temperature, and seemed almost paralysed. Mother did her best, but she could not diagnose the trouble, let alone treat it. In my mind’s eye, I can still see Eustace lying there helpless in bed. He could not even move a hand, as I well know, because one day when he called out for help, and Mother being no doubt worn out with work and worry sent me up to help him, I found he needed a handkerchief to wipe his nose! It was right there, but he could not use it.
George Churchill came along one day (he was unmarried at that time – footnote 1), and on seeing how things were, said he would go for help. In Stonyview School District, seven or eight [33] miles south there lived a young man, Len Broughton, who had partially trained as a doctor, but had given it up on account of a drinking problem, I believe. He was affectionately called “Doc Broughton”, a very nice, personable young man, and by that time married to the daughter of a settler, making a pretence at farming. In the middle of the night, George came back with this semi-doctor, who, after examining the patient, pronounced the verdict – rheumatic fever, which according to the dictionary is “an acute disease characterised by high fever, acid sweats, and very painful swollen joints”. So my poor brother must have suffered a lot. Mother was advised to give him frequent cool sponge-baths, also to give him buttermilk and lime-juice to drink. We had plenty of the former, and it was real buttermilk, sweet; not the terrible stuff they call buttermilk here in the city (footnote 2) nowadays, which is nothing but left-over milk with some sort of acid added to turn it sour, since homogenized milk will not go sour naturally but just goes bad and unfit for use. The lime juice had to be fetched from Invermay, eight miles away; one of us went for it the next day. George drove Doc Broughton home again that night, and I do not recall ever seeing hm again. He may well have saved my brother’s life – but it was lost forever in 1916 (footnote 3)!
Another occurrence – Father had taken a load of grain to Hewson’s mill, a good many miles north, to be crushed for feeding to the cows and pigs. It was a long trip on a cold winter’s day, and very late when the job was done and he started home. It was already dark. We were very worried when it was late, and no sign of him; but at long last he arrived. His feet had become very cold, so he walked behind the sleigh for miles. Actually, his toes were frozen, and as he walked one of them rubbed raw; he could not know that, as it was frozen, so no feeling. It turned out that there was quite a deep hole worn into his big toe, and later on it became gangrenous. Miraculously, it did get better without him losing life or even limb, by the grace of God or Mother’s skill – some of each, I have no doubt. At this time, my father was sixty years of age (footnote 4).
Transcriber’s footnotes:
1. The future husband of Olive’s sister Nora.
2. Olive lived the latter years of her life in the city of Victoria BC.
3. Eustace was killed in the first world war; see the next chapter.
4. I.e. approx Dec 1916 or probably early 1917; Olive would have been 16 at the time.
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