Scalpels and Buggywhips: Medical Pioneers of Central BC

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

Born in California, gynecologist–obstetrician Eldon Lee moved to
central British Columbia at the age of 5. Scalpels and Buggywhips is his
tribute to the doctors who, in the early years of the 20th century,
struggled against the challenges of practising their craft in a land
“gripped by a harsh winter five months of the year ... plagued by
insects and difficult terrain.” The book is a collection of vignettes
and biographical sketches supported by the author’s personal
recollections, drawn from his childhood and a medical career that
commenced in 1952, as well as other oral testimonies. Eldon’s
wide-ranging and very personal narrative opens with a brief
consideration of the role of Native shamans in central British Columbia.
At one point, an early 20th-century Williams Lake female pioneer who
recalls how her friends arranged for a shaman to attend to a stricken
infant, conventional medical treatment having failed. Lee’s personal
experience with shamans, involving a traumatized Native girl, convinced
him that “with stress-related diseases and demon possessions they did
well.”

Chapter 2 provides a chronology of practitioners during the Cariboo
Gold Rush, including the establishment of the Royal Cariboo Hospital in
Barkerville, in 1863, a topic that begs its own historian. Chapters 3 to
7 are biographical sketches of some of the key medical players on the
scene up to the 1950s. There is a brief chapter on the travails of the
doctor’s wife, his necessary “helpmate” in such a setting; a
fuller treatment of missionary involvement in health-care delivery; a
vignette of a tragic case of death in childbirth; and a chapter on
construction camp doctors. Two of the biographical sketches are
contributed by Lee’s colleagues, Dr. Al Holley and Dr. Jack McKenzie.

This eclectic mix of stories about pioneer medicine gives readers a
glimpse of the daily life of people who settled in the often-harsh
interior of British Columbia. At the same time, it opens up many
interesting possibilities for further research by social historians and
historians of medicine.