The Yuletide is a season for sorting through memories. Sometimes a faded memory, almost gone forever, thrusts itself forward to be revitalized. One of them came to me recently. I recalled a summer day when I stood in front of my house and saw four strangers - an elderly man and woman and a man and woman who were even older - across the avenue engaged in an energetic debate. At least, the older couple were. Splinters of their disagreement were flying everywhere, like mosquitoes at a picnic. "The house was here," he said.
"There were two," she huffed.
"I know", he answered. "One was here and one was there."
"No," she insisted," One was there and the other was here."
I could see they were in need of a home-grown historian, so I doddered over and introduced myself. "My name is Walker," the vigorous old man said. "I was just a boy when we came here in 1918. My dad built two houses right about here".
"Right about there," argued the older woman stubbornly. "I am his sister. I was born in 1921 at the cottage hospital. Old Doc Lord delivered me."
"And Doc Lord delivered me," I announced proudly, "at the new hospital."
"You were one of the 3,434 babies he ushered into the world," she said. The old girl certainly knew something about local history, even if she did have her houses mixed up. "And," she went on, "Old Doc Lord saved Art's eye when he almost put it out by smashing into that runner when he had his sled tied on behind a farmer's sleigh."
"Yeah," her brother interjected, ''old Doc sewed it in so good they said in Regina there was nothing more needed to be done. I still got that eye. It still works."
So this was Art Walker, the subject of the cautionary tale, the man who belonged in that long ago, frightening world of bogeymen, monsters and foolish children who lost themselves in the woods. Over and over, I had been told not to tie my sled to a farmer's sleigh. I was to remember what happened to the Walker boy.
We conversed a while longer and sorted out what had happened to the Walker houses. Then the travellers moved on to look for more landmarks and find more reasons for disagreement.
Alone again, I began to think about the pioneer doctor and the former hospitals. Dr. Joseph W. Lord was the first doctor in Kindersley. He left to go overseas in the Great War. When he returned he came to Eatonia, where he was instrumental in setting up a union hospital district and in persuading the province to approve the construction of a small hospital, one of the first two to be built, in 1925.
The new hospital was a wondrous place. It had water (untreated) piped in from the CNR's water tower line, indoor plumbing, an operating room and an X-ray machine. It also had a huge garden, a root cellar and a barn with a cow in it. The janitor (that's what we called them in those days) looked after the hospital, the garden, the root cellar and the cow. There was fresh, raw milk every day. Now, the garden, barn, cow and root cellar were not aseptic. Neither was the janitor. There was never a case of food poisoning, however, in the hospital, and no killer organisms ever took up residence there. The place looked after the ill and the injured and brought mothers and children safely through the ordeal of birth. And it made it possible for those who lost the battle for life to die peacefully among friends.
Nothing about the organization of the place was complicated. The lady who ran it was called The Matron. She told everybody what to do, including the janitor and the man who kept the books. We called him a secretary-treasurer, and he never gave orders to anybody.
We certainly have come a long way in the health field since those primitive times. Why, now we have more fancy positions and fancy titles than you can shake a stick at. In view of all these remarkable advances, I ought to feel more safe now than I did way back then. But I don't.
