Amazing Medical Stories

by George Burden

  nursing school that would accept her as a student. Dr. Williams — greatly disturbed by this situation — decided it was time to found a hospital where black doctors could serve as interns and where black women could train as nurses. He insisted on only one thing: it must be an interracial institution that would be open to all, regardless of race, gender or creed. In May 1891, Provident Hospital opened its doors with black and white doctors on staff, and seven young women, including Emma Reynolds, enrolled in the first interracial nursing class in the United States. (A Canadian woman, Jessie Sleet, was a member of that class. She became the first black woman to work as a district nurse for a charitable organization in New York City.)

  It was at the new hospital, two years later, that Dr. Williams performed his miraculous surgery. James Cornish was in critical condition when he was rushed to Provident Hospital. He had been stabbed in the chest, was in severe pain and obviously dying. Most colleagues, when faced with such a terrible injury, would not have considered operating. Dr. Williams did not share this kind of reticence. Boldly and skillfully, he repaired the tear in his patient’s heart. Today, the significance of this surgery continues to be challenged, but there is little doubt that Dan Williams deserves full credit for performing the first operation of its kind in medical history.

  James Cornish made a rapid recovery. The positive outcome encouraged Dr. Williams to perform at least two other successful heart operations. Later, while working at the Freedmen’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., he operated on a number of other complex cases. During his time there, fewer than ten postoperative deaths were reported, yet he was never invited to join the District Medical Society, which was a predominantly white professional association. Dr. Williams felt it was imperative that he respond to this racial prejudice. In 1895, with the support of three white and five black physicians, the Medico-Surgical Society of the District of Columbia was formed. The same year, he helped found the National Medical Foundation.

  Engrossed in his surgical practice, Williams was shocked to learn that his status at Freedmen’s Hospital was being undermined. When the situation became unbearable, he concluded he had no choice but to resign from the hospital and return to his practice in Chicago.

  Within months of his return to Chicago, Dr. Williams turned his attention to the South, where he knew the black population desperately needed access to proper medical care. For some time, a medical college in the southern United States had been trying to create an academic environment that would lead to the graduation of a greater number of black doctors. Dr Williams was more than willing to help them achieve this objective. Without remuneration, he began to work and teach at the college. His enormous commitment to improve medical care for blacks living in the American South had a significant payoff: it fostered forty hospitals in twenty different states. Helen Buckler insists that his fervour, his unremitting labour and uncompromising perfectionism truly earned him the right to be known as the “Moses to Negro Medicine.”

  In 1912, Dr. Williams reluctantly resigned from Provident, the hospital that he had helped found. The man who had replaced him as its medical director had always resented the older physician’s high standing in mainstream medicine and had done everything possible to destroy his credibility. However, Dr. Williams’ reputation remained unblemished. In 1913, he was the only black man among a hundred surgeons who were formally installed as members of the newly formed American College of Surgeons, and in 1919, black doctors practicing in Missouri presented him with a silver cup to express their appreciation for his work in advancing the medical profession in that state and all of the United States.

  On August 4, 1931, Daniel Hale Williams died. In his will, the bulk of his estate was designated for the benefit of his race. The largest bequest, $8,000, went to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

  Sadly, the hospital Dr. Williams founded had a troubled existence, even though a new faculty with three hundred beds was opened in 1983. However, this rejuvenation was brief. Five years later, serious financial and management problems resulted in the sudden closure of Provident Hospital. In 1991, the then-derelict facility was purchased by the city, and more than fifty-eight million dollars was spent on renovations. Calls to Provident Hospital in Cook County revealed that there is little evidence at the refurbished facility to mark Dr. Williams’s contribution to the original hospital, and there is no official acknowledgment of his remarkable medical career. No play or movie has been made about this extraordinary doctor and surgical pioneer; Helen Buckler’s book stands alone.

  This raises a question: If Dr. Williams had been white, or if he had chosen to keep his black heritage a secret, would his memory have received the tribute it deserves?

  Dorothy Grant

  THE DOCTOR

  AND THE KING OF SIAM

  Most people are familiar with Anna Leonowens, the Victorian-era governess and teacher of the multitudinous offspring of Mongkut, the King of Siam. Anna’s book, The English Governess at the Siamese Court, created a sensation in the nineteenth century. Her renown was further magnified by Margaret Landon’s 1944 biography, Anna and the King of Siam, which inspired the subsequent hit musical and Hollywood film, The King and I. Few know that after her adventures in Southeast Asia, she moved to Canada, where she spent most of her life. Fewer still realize that beginning with her grandson, James Fyshe, she founded a medical dynasty, all of them McGill graduates with a taste for adventure as strong as her own. (Though Boris Karloff is also a descendant of Anna, we won’t include him as he only played Dr. Frankenstein’s very famous patient.)

  Dr. James Fyshe was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on March 8, 1879, the first of six siblings. His father, Thomas Fyshe, was an executive with the Bank of Nova Scotia, and he had married Anna’s daughter Avis in June of the previous year in New York. James was something of a favourite with his grandmother, who shared their Halifax home. His childhood was dominated by this strong-willed woman who regaled him with stories of her adventures in India, Thailand, Russia and other exotic places. Her tutelage was strict, with little time allowed away from schooling and homework. Despite this, his childhood diary indicates James’s lively interest in ponds and trout fishing, proving at least an occasional escape from his grandmother’s watchful eye.

  In 1888, Anna packed up the entire clan, except the children’s poor father, Thomas, for a five-year sojourn in Germany. This was arranged to further her grandchildren’s education and to allow her to attend lectures

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  Dr. James Fyshe travelled to Siam in the footsteps of his illustrious grandmother, Anna Leonowens. THE FYSHE FAMILY

  on Sanskrit (apparently a waste of time as she turned out to know more Sanskrit than her instructor). While in Europe, she assumed the care of two more grandchildren, offspring of her son Louis, who had become a prosperous businessman in Thailand. Unfortunately, Louis’ wife, the daughter of a Thai princess, died in her mid-thirties of kidney disease. So he sent the children off to be raised by their grandmother while he pursued an unconventional lifestyle (at least for a Victorian-era Englishman), which included concubines, a harem and troupes of acrobats, boxers, and dancers.

  After the return of his family, now grown in number by two, Thomas, the long-suffering bank executive, was transferred to Montreal. Not long after the family’s arrival, Avis died of “acute gastrointestinal catarrh and congestive heart failure,” and Anna assumed the duty of raising her eight grandchildren.

  James enrolled in Arts at Harvard University, but in 1901 he transferred to McGill, where he earned a BA. By 1904 he decided his future lay in medicine, and he subsequently graduated from McGill Medical School, standing seventh in his class. James did his medical residency at the Montreal General Hospital and afterwards became medical superintendent at the Alexandra Hospital for Contagious Diseases.

  He did not remain there long before he decided to follow in his grandmother’s footsteps and take up the position of Superintendent of the Government Hospital in
Bangkok, as well as the title of Assistant Medical Officer of Health. On his arrival in Bangkok in 1907, after a four-month sea journey, his Uncle Louis greeted Dr. Fyshe with great fanfare. A prim and proper Victorian gentleman, thanks to his grandmother’s teachings, James no doubt looked a little askance at his uncle’s notorious activities. He was also faced with a formidable task in reforming the Thai health care system and dealing with the myriad diseases endemic in Southeast Asia. Even with King Chulalongkorn as an ally, the bureaucracy of Siam was slow to make changes, which James must have found extremely frustrating. King Chulalongkorn died of kidney disease in 1910 (one wonders if some hereditary form of renal disease, perhaps polycystic kidneys, ran in the royal family). With the loss of his royal patron’s support, James realized his task was hopeless. He decided to return to Canada in 1911. However, his stay had not been fruitless. While in Thailand, Dr. Fyshe had gained a young bride, Julia Corisande Mattice, from Montreal, known more commonly by her interesting sobriquet, “Zulu.” A son, Thomas, had been born to the couple in 1909, before their departure.

  On his return to Montreal, James became superintendent of the Montreal General Hospital. He served as major in World War I and after the war moved to Alberta, where he became administrator of the Royal Alexandra Hospital and helped found the Alberta Hospital Association. James subsequently moved to the small town of Waterhole, near the Peace River. His granddaughter, Dr. Avis Fyshe Boyar, tells me he was the first person to cross the frozen Peace River in a Model T Ford while on a house call. Unfortunately, Dr. James Fyshe died of an apparent heart attack while crossing the street to his clinic in 1921. He was only forty-three.

  James’s only child, son Thomas, went on to graduate from McGill Medical School in 1936. Dr. Thomas “Tam” Fyshe had worked his way through medical school prospecting in northern Quebec; then — exhibiting the family wanderlust — he went off to Peru to work on top of a mountain as medical officer for a mining company. In order to take his annual leave, Tam Fyshe had to descend 14,000 feet on muleback along the old Inca trail to reach Lima.

  He subsequently worked in the Canadian Medical Corps during the Second World War, treating survivors of the Dieppe disaster. Later he served on the front lines in Italy, his arrival only slightly delayed when the troop carrier in which he was travelling was torpedoed and sank.

  At the termination of the war, while shipping back to Canada, Tam Fyshe met George Gilmour, the Chancellor of McMaster University, who convinced him to go to work in Hamilton. He agreed and took a position as a general surgeon at the prestigious McGregor Clinic.

  During his career, Tam Fyshe worked on an early prototype of the artificial knee and also performed the first open-heart surgery in Hamilton. His daughter, Dr. Avis Fyshe Boyar, describes him as being a very modest man who never considered his first “valve job” as anything especially extraordinary. He passed away, in 1998, at the age of eighty-nine.

  Avis is also a McGill graduate, a family physician with a special interest in palliative care. Another victim of the family adventure bug, she served a stint in China, then set up the first palliative care unit of its kind at the King’s Hospital in Saudi Arabia, and finally returned to western Canada.

  George Burden

  ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

  MEDICAL INVENTOR

  If you asked Alexander Graham Bell his profession, his reply until the day he died would have been, “teacher of the deaf.” All of his life he was destined to share an intimate connection with the hearing impaired; his mother became profoundly deaf later in life, and his beloved wife, Mabel, was totally deaf from the age of five, after a bout of scarlet fever. Bell’s grandfather was a pioneer of speech therapy, and his father, Alexander Melville Bell, was the inventor of a system called Visible Speech. Visible Speech used a system of symbols to represent the positioning of the palate, mouth and tongue. Even the profoundly deaf could learn to speak by using these symbols. Young Aleck showed early promise in the field of speech therapy; as a child he taught his dog to say a few rudimentary phrases by manipulating the animal’s glottis. Later, while living in Brantford, Ontario, he learned to speak fluently with the neighbouring Mohawk Indians using the Visible Speech system of his father. As a result, they initiated him into the tribe with full ceremonies.

  Aleck Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on March 3, 1847. Later his family lived in London, but after his two brothers contracted tuberculosis and died, young Aleck began to ail, and his father decided to flee the London smog for the fresh air of Upper Canada, where Aleck thrived. Later he moved to Boston to teach the hearing impaired. There he fell in love with and married one of his students, Mabel Hubbard, who encouraged her husband in all of his endeavours.

  At the age of twenty-nine, he invented and patented the telephone. This marked not the culmination but rather the beginning of his long and diverse career as an inventor. While his permanent home became Washington, D.C., Bell loathed the hot, humid summers and subsequently

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  The first medical X-ray in Canada. Taken by Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, this film allowed doctors to find and remove a needle from the long-suffering patient’s foot. PARKS CANADA / ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE

  built a large house on his estate on Bras d’Or Lake in Cape Breton. Beinn Bhreagh, meaning “beautiful mountain” in Gaelic, remains a home of Bell’s descendants to this day. It witnessed the fruition of some of Alexander Bell’s most innovative ideas. These included many medical devices, the first powered flight in the British Empire and pioneering work in hydroplane technology, which was to set world records for speed in water craft.

  When American President James Garfield was shot in 1881, his physicians asked Bell to locate the bullet. Bell hoped to use a metal detector, which he had developed, to carry out this task. Though previously successful, the device malfunctioned due to the failure to remove all metal from the hospital room as Bell had requested. The mattress on which the President rested contained metal coils, so new an innovation at the time that few had heard of it. Bell rushed back to his lab and developed a “bullet probe” or “telephonic needle probe” which could be inserted into the entry wound. This invention was used very effectively in the Boer War and in World War I, but it was unfortunately too late to aid President Garfield. Ironically, the bullet was found in a fairly innocuous location at the autopsy, and it is thought that death probably resulted from infection due to repeated manual probing by the President’s doctors. Bell was later awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Medicine at Heidelberg University for his bullet probe.

  Another medical device invented by Bell was the audiometer. Developed in 1879, it is similar to the ones we use today to assess hearing loss. In honour of his work in this field, the unit by which we measure sound, the decibel, was named for the inventor. Genetics was another area Bell explored, and he studied in depth the patterns of deafness and longevity in humans.

  Bell became fascinated by Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen’s invention of the X-ray in 1895 and began working on his own device, taking the first medical X-ray in Canada at his home in Baddeck, in October 1897. True to the inventor’s practical nature, the subject was not merely a healthy volunteer but a man with persistent foot and leg pain. Two local physicians, Dr. MacDonald and Dr. McKeen, asked Bell’s help in locating a broken needle fragment in this patient’s foot. The X-ray showed the needle clearly, and the doctors removed it, completely relieving the man’s suffering. Bell also was the first person in North America to advocate treatment of deep-seated cancers using radium encased in glass tubes, thus becoming our first radiation oncologist.

  Bell became interested in respiratory disease after it claimed the life of one of his sons. He invented an artificial lung, the “vacuum jacket,” remarkably like the iron lung used fifty years later to save polio victims. He hoped also to use this to resuscitate victims of drowning and successfully employed it to revive a sheep which had drowned. One of Bell’s

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  Dr. Alexander Gra
ham Bell searching with his metal detector for the bullet which felled American President James Garfield. PARKS CANADA / ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL NATIONAL

  employees witnessed this and, convinced it was the work of the devil, quit his job and even refused to accept a final paycheque.

  Though his amiable nature made him well loved in the community, Bell had developed a bit of a reputation as an eccentric among some of the people in Baddeck. His early aviation experiments with huge kites did nothing to dispel this reputation, nor did his tendency to run around outside in his bathing suit during storms or float on Bras d’Or Lake on an inner tube smoking cigars for hours on end. Even after dark, his granddaughter reminisced, she’d often spot the glowing tip of his cigar in the gloom of the inlet.

  Shortly after the Wright brothers’ first flight, Bell formed the Aerial Experimentation Association. Under his auspices, John McCurdy designed and piloted the first heavier-than-air aircraft in the British Empire. The Silver Dart lifted off from the ice in Baddeck on January 9, 1909, flying nearly a mile at an altitude of thirty feet. This technology was subsequently adapted to build high-speed hydrofoils (or hydrodromes, as Bell called them). It was hoped these vessels could be used to hunt down German U-Boats that were causing such devastation to shipping in World War I. In 1919, together with Casey Baldwin, Bell set the world waterspeed record of 70.86 miles per hour in the HD 4. This record was not broken for ten years. With the end of the war, the government lost interest in the hydrodrome project. The work of Bell and Baldwin was revived in the 1970s when Canada built a hydrofoil submarine chaser, appropriately named the Bras d’Or.

  The HD 4 rotted on the shore for years until salvaged and incorporated into the displays of the Alexander Graham Bell Museum in Baddeck. This national historic site retains many of Bell’s original inventions, which were donated by the family, as well as a full-scale replica of the HD 4. Here also can be seen Bell’s artificial lung and his early X-ray equipment. There is even a telephone which used sunlight to transmit sound, impractical at the time, but anticipating fibre-optic and laser communication by a hundred years.