By Colleen Palumbo
One would think that the early days of health care in this area would have been haphazard at best, but records indicate to us that may not be true at all.
The Canadian Pacific Railway was the chief employer before the turn of the century in this area, and it was in their best interest to provide every amenity possible to their men. This included a doctor. It was a very difficult and often impossible task to find a health care professional who was willing to follow along with the laying of the rail. But the CP Rail tried to see that each of their sections was equipped with a doctor. In December of 1896, Dr. A.P. Proctor was brought to Donald as the official CP Rail doctor and would cover the area known as the Selkirk section.
Within a very short time, he was set up at the hospital in Donald, which really was nothing more than a tumble down shack, and began to make friends of the locals.
Dr. Proctor had a way with people, and was soon endearing himself to the general population as well as his patients. Most especially, he loved the children. Dr. Proctor believed that the population depended on what the children were and therefore it was in everyone’s best interest to see that they were healthy and well educated. He was soon active in all manner of clubs and became the most eligible bachelor in the district.
Although we have no firm records to verify the kind of maladies that the good doctor would have treated we are aware that typhoid fever was prevalent in the area during that time period. As well, the doctor would have treated all the broken bones, gunshot wounds and other health care problems that would have arisen. The most interesting of these would have been his early attempt at skin grafting.
Although skin grafting had been performed earlier it really hadn’t been proven until as late as 1869 by a physician called Jacques Louis Reverdin. Before that time several rather barbaric sounding cures were tried with very little success. Among these was tannic acid, gentian violet, and concentrated silver nitrate all of which failed to produce the desired effect. After this period passed the methods of treating burn victims changed and it was generally believed that the best treatment was to wash the wounds thoroughly with soap and water and leave them in the open air to dry.
It was only after the Second World War that any significant advances were made in the field of skin grafting. That makes it seem even more incredible that Dr. Proctor was working with the idea in Donald in 1897.
A young child, whom records only call the Daniels child, was brought to the doctor suffering bums over a large part of its body. I’m sure that the doctor was only brought in to tell the parents that there was no chance of survival, but the doctor wasn’t so willing to just give up.
Word spread that the doctor was trying to save the child’s life but that skin donors would be needed and soon the doctor had all the donors he needed to make the job complete.
It must have taken courage to donate skin in those days when freezing an area was not used yet. Dr. Proctor grafted 52 pieces of skin from different residents of Donald.
Only one of the grafts didn’t take and the records indicate that it was because the child removed it.
Unfortunately we don’t know if the child survived, but we do know that he lived with his successful grafts for over a month, which according to the information that I researched about burns gave him real good odds.
It seems kind of impossible when you think of the conditions that the doctor was working under: dirt floors, poor lighting, little information, poor sanitation and the constant threat of infection. Infection is still considered to be one of the main reasons people die from burns today.
After only 15 months at Donald, Dr. Proctor entered into a partnership with Dr. Furrer, of Kamloops. doctors Cross and Malloch were each stationed at Donald after Dr. Proctor but he was the last full time doctor to practice before the C.P.R. considered that local health care would be handled by the doctor at Golden.
