Doctor Olds of Twillingate: Portrait of an American Surgeon in Newfoundland

Olaf Uwe Janzen is an associate professor of history at Sir Wilfred
Grenfell College, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

John Olds grew up in comfortable circumstances in Connecticut, enjoying
the perquisites of an upper-middle-class life that included sailing,
polo, and an education at Yale and Johns Hopkins Universities. In 1930,
while in his third year of medical school, he and five other students
spent a six-week practicum at the hospital in Twillingate, Newfoundland.
Olds fell in love with the place, returned there in 1932 with his young
bride, and made it his home for the next 40 years, devoting his life and
his labor to the fisher-folk of Newfoundland.

Gary Saunders’s compelling account traces Olds’s life from
childhood through young adulthood into the early years in Twillingate.
The author then abandons this chronological approach in favor of a
series of chapter-length vignettes through which we discover specific
facets of Olds’s character. Comparisons with Newfoundland’s other
famous doctor, Sir Wilfred Grenfell, are inevitable: where Grenfell
spent his winters on the North American lecture circuit, raising money,
Olds remained in Twillingate year-round, often trekking through miles of
forbidding winter landscape to visit his patients.

Some readers may be frustrated by Saunders’s reconstructions of
conversations and personal reflections of his subject; yet he bases such
liberties on hundreds of letters made available to him by members of the
Olds family. And Saunders’s readable prose soon captivates the reader
to the point where the absence of documentation (there are neither
reference notes nor a bibliography) is ignored.

This well-written memoir is also recommended for the insight it gives
into the harsh lives of outport Newfoundlanders. Saunders presents,
without romanticizing, the perseverance of the people in the face of
such inconceivable difficulties as endemic poverty and a tuberculosis
epidemic.