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By Dr. Allan Marble
On May 7, 1910, Dr. John Stewart amputated Nova Scotia Premier George Murray’s left leg at the Victoria General Hospital in Halifax. This very little-known event was reported in a very brief statement in the Halifax Evening Mail on May 9, 1910, which read:
By Dr. Allan Marble
The long-awaited invasion of northwest Europe by the Allies took place June 6, 1944. Several medical officers from Nova Scotia participated in the Normandy invasion, including: Lt-Col. Victor 0. Mader from Halifax; Lt.-Col. Donald Campbell from Marble Mountain, Cape Breton; Lt.-Col. Clarence Bethune from Baddeck; and Lt.-Col. Clarence L. Gosse from Halifax.
By Dr. Allan Marble
Prior to 1888, women were unable to enroll in medical school in Canada and had to travel to New York or Philadelphia to study for an MD. Annie Maxwell from Mount Thom, Pictou County, obtained her MD in 1873 at the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. She did not return to Nova Scotia to practise, however. Maria Angwin, an MD graduate of the Women’s Medical College in New York, became the first female doctor to establish a practice in Halifax in 1886.
By Dr. Allan Marble
Dr. Joseph Lister first used carbolic acid as an antiseptic during an operation on a patient with a compound fracture at the Glasgow Infirmary in Scotland on Aug. 12, 1865. He published a paper on this successful procedure in the Lancet on March 16, 1867.
By Dr. Allan Marble
In much of the 19th and 20th centuries, medical taboos meant that the heart was off-limits for surgeons. In 1880, Dr. Theodor Billroth, chief of the surgical clinic at the famous Vienna School of Surgery, wrote:
By Dr. Allan Marble
The era of antibiotics began with the introduction of penicillin in the early 1940s. Although Alexander Fleming had discovered the unusual ability of penicillin to kill harmful bacteria in 1928, it was another 10 years before researchers at Oxford University success-fully purified penicillin and first administered it to a patient.
By Dr. Allan Marble
A total of 236 medical officers and 286 nursing sisters from Nova Scotia served in First World War. These numbers are remarkable: Nova Scotia provided just over 15% of Canada’s medical officers and nursing sisters during the war, even though the province had only 6% of Canada’s population.
By Dr. Allan Marble
In August 1914, Maj.-Gen. Dr. Guy Carleton Jones, Director of Medical Services for the Canadian Army, invited Margaret Clotilde MacDonald to Ottawa and asked her to mobilize Canada’s Nursing Sisters. They had both served in the South African War (1900–02), and very likely met at that time. Maj.-Gen. Jones was no doubt aware of Miss MacDonald’s extensive military and nursing career, which had begun in 1898 with the Spanish American War.
By Dr. Allan Marble
In August 1914, at the outbreak of the First World War, there were 20 medical officers in the Canadian Army. During the war, another 1,525 medical officers enlisted, including more than 200 doctors from Nova Scotia.
By Dr. Allan Marble
The Nova Scotia government opened the Provincial and City Hospital in Halifax in 1867 and renamed it the Victoria General Hospital in 1887.
By Dr. Allan Marble
Between September 1918 and April 1919, more than 2,000 Nova Scotians died of Spanish influenza. It first appeared in Cape Breton in early September, having been brought there by soldiers returning from Europe. The influenza had attacked both Germans and Allies on the battlefields during the summer of 1918, and had a major role to play in the outcome of the war.
By Dr. Allan Marble
Prior to the 17th century, the disease we now call pulmonary tuberculosis was called phthisis, a Greek word that described the wasting and melting away of the body due to a lung disease. English physicians in the 17th century adopted the Latin word consumer, meaning to eat up or devour, to describe emaciated patients who were burning up with fever and losing weight. They referred to the fore-going wasting disease as “consumption.”
By Dr. Allan Marble
Although radium was discovered by the Curies in 1898, and Henri Becquerel noted that skin became severely inflamed when placed in close proximity to radium in 1901, it took many years before the rare element became available to kill cancerous cells.
By Dr. Allan Marble
At the time of the Halifax Explosion, Dr. George H. Cox had been practising as an oculist and aurist in New Glasgow, N.S., for 20 years. But none of his training and experience could have prepared him for what he saw in Halifax on the evening of Dec. 6, 1917.
By Dr. Allan Marble
Books written about the Halifax explosion tend to focus on the exceptional contribution of the six American hospital units that provided medical and surgical services to the injured.
By Dr. Allan Marble
Following the Second World War, the Red Cross in Canada turned its attentions to providing health care for people in isolated communities.
