Tales from My Little Black Bag

Cynthia R. Comacchio is an assistant professor of history at Wilfrid
Laurier University and the author of Nations Are Built of Babies: Saving
Ontario’s Mothers and Children.

Hailing from Saskatchewan, though trained at Queen’s Medical School,
John R. Ibberson has many interesting tales to recount from a varied
career spanning some 50 years. Enlisted in the Canadian armed forces as
a medical student during World War II, Ibberson interned at Vancouver
General. He did his postgraduate training at Shaughnessy Veteran’s
Hospital as the troops returned from the Pacific operations, some of
them in horrifying physical and mental states. Lack of funds forced him
to take a job with Imperial Oil as physician at the Norman Wells
refinery in the Northwest Territories. He went on to a rich and varied
career, serving as medical director for the Frosst Company in Montreal,
overseeing the development of the Dr. W.W. Cross Cancer Hospital in
Edmonton, and ultimately returning to private practice in Calgary. This
lively memoir will interest both readers of medical biographies and
historians of medicine in Canada.