Mustard Plasters and Handcars: Through the Eyes of a Red Cross Outpost Nurse

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

Little has been published on the Red Cross outpost hospitals established
in rural Ontario in the early 1900s. This detailed memoir is valuable
both as local history and as broader Ontario social history.

During the Depression of the 1930s, the author was posted to the Red
Cross outpost in Wilber-force, which had been established earlier as the
first of the outpost hospitals in the province. This “hospital” was
a small house staffed by the author and a teenaged housekeeper. As the
only medical service available in the area, the outpost nurse not only
treated injuries and illnesses, but attended numerous childbirth
confinements.

Miller writes comfortably about her role as a city-trained nurse
dropped into a scarcely settled backwoods. The difficulties of
transportation, severe winter weather, lack of resources, and the
poverty and isolation of her patients are among the challenges she
encountered without hesitation or complaint. (She does give herself
numerous pats on the back for managing better than other nurses in the
same position.)

Miller’s memories of providing medical services and public health
education are interwoven with other aspects of her personal life and the
community in general. Through her eyes we see the social events, home
remedies, meals, transportation, neighborly support, and especially the
fortitude of a desperately poor population. Supporting the text are
amateur and professional photos from the era, and several pen-and-ink
sketches by the author.