Amazing Medical Stories (11 page)

Witnesses described the blast from afar as resembling a huge mushroom cloud, and Robert Oppenheimer later would study the effects of the explosion in calculating the strength of the atomic bombs destined for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Over two square miles of the city were flattened, and the harbour was emptied of water, the subsequent tidal wave swamping the Dartmouth side and amplifying the toll of death and destruction. A black cloud hung over the city, and a toxic rain of tar and shrapnel fell for some time after.

Into this nightmare landscape were to arrive the first relief workers: a trainload of doctors, nurses and aid workers dispatched from the nearby communities of Kentville and Windsor. Among them was Dr. Percy McGrath, a recent graduate of Dalhousie Medical College, and his wife, a nurse. Unfortunately the railroad tracks were wrecked well out of the city, at Rockingham, and the rescuers had to trudge through rubble and past bodies “stacked like cord wood,” on either side of their path. One doctor compared the flames and death all around to the nether regions of hell from Dante's
Inferno.

Many of the injured were in horrific shape because flying glass had lacerated faces and damaged eyes. This was compounded by the fact that the sound of the blast had preceded the shock wave, luring many to run to their windows to see what happened seconds before the glass dissolved into a spray of razor-like shards. Conversely, the noise may have saved the life of the father-in-law of one of my patients. Mr. Robert Parker told me that his wife's father was driving a wagon just mounting the crest of a hill overlooking the
Mont Blanc
at the moment of detonation. The horse bolted at the sound and pulled the wagon around to the lee side of the hill, allowing the blast to pass over the driver's head without harming him.

Dorothea “Dot” Buchanan, a still-spry nonagenarian, related to me her experience of the explosion as a child of eight, living not far from the detonation site. Her family's grocery business was almost flattened, and a

In the devastation of the Halifax Explosion, many babies were orphaned or separated from their families. They were gathered by rescuers from the wreckage of their homes and taken to hospital nurseries.
KITZ COLLECTION, MARITIME MUSEUM OF THE ATLANTIC

large chunk of metal from the
Mont Blanc
fell though four levels of their large house, embedding itself in the cellar. The family lived in the walk-in meat locker of the grocery store for some time after. Dot's father, a tram driver, usually drove the waterfront route in Halifax, but due to the sickness of another driver he was doing the far-off Armdale route that day. The substitute driver on the waterfront route and the trolley car itself disappeared without a trace. The explosion blew the clothing right off many people, frequently without seriously injuring the nude victim. Dot recounts how her father happened on a woman naked in the street save for a purse and high heels. He garbed her in his coat, an act of generosity compounded by the fact that he also inadvertently gave her the trolley
fares for the day, sixty-five dollars, in the garment's pocket, a small fortune in 1917.

Dot's family was luckier than most, with no serious losses. Many were less fortunate. An enumeration of common injuries suffered during the explosion included amputations, burns, lacerations and fractures as well as eye trauma. Thirty-seven people were left blinded and two hundred and six individuals lost an eye. The faces of many would remain disfigured throughout their lives. Incredibly, some victims, such as Barbara Orr, reported being pushed by the blast for a quarter of a mile without lethal injury. In the hard-hit Richmond area of the city, entire households were obliterated. There were many orphans, and the pitiful remnants of once-large families rejoined to mourn and bury their dead.

Initial relief efforts were hampered by fears that a second explosion would ensue from the munitions depot at the Wellington Barracks. Aid workers were forced to evacuate, leaving many to their fates in burning buildings. Records of the Halifax Children's Hospital, however, show that upon being ordered to clear the building, the feisty superintendent, blood dribbling down her face, declared, “No one shall leave this building. It would mean the death of many of the children if they had to be moved…, and if it should be that we are to die… it will be at our post.” The Wellington munitions depot did not explode, thanks to the heroic efforts of Lieutenant C.A. McLennan, who doused hot coals blown into the bunker with a fire extinguisher. Another hero of the day was Vince Coleman, a worker at the Richmond railway yards, who stayed at his telegrapher's station to warn away trains advancing to their doom. He died instantly in the blast.

Needless to say, hospitals and morgues were overwhelmed by the gigantic load placed upon them. There were only four public hospitals in the Halifax area. The two largest were the Victoria General Hospital and the Nova Scotia Hospital for Infectious Disease, with less than four hundred beds between them, many already full. There was also the Children's Hospital and another tiny infectious disease clinic. Four military hospitals and seven smaller privately run facilities were also able to accept patients. An American hospital ship, the U.S.S.
Old Colony,
took on two hundred wounded. Though the Camp Hill military hospital had two hundred and eighty beds, it had fourteen hundred patients crammed into its wards and

The morning after the Halifax Explosion.
NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF CANADA, C-019953

corridors on December 6. Supplies of anaesthetics were limited, forcing many surgical procedures to be done without chloroform. Perhaps because many were still in shock, this did not present as much of an obstacle to surgery as might be expected. Supplies of anti-tetanus serum were also limited and were used only on very high risk injuries, but tetanus was rare and far less problematic than tuberculosis. Worsened by the cold, poor nutrition and crowded living conditions, the “White Plague” was soon stalking the corridors of the hospitals and the shelters for the displaced.

To compound matters, nature played a cruel joke by dumping sixteen inches of snow on the devastated city the day after the explosion. It was the worst blizzard in years and very unusual for Halifax at this season. There was a critical shortage of food, bedding and clothing. Clothes distribution was hampered by the reluctance of many with dead family members to wear colours other than black. The disruption of communications hampered the dissemination of news of the disaster, but once word had spread, aid poured in from all over Canada, including almost every town in Nova Scotia. The state of Massachusetts proved amazingly generous and contributed more than $750,000 in money and goods, a tremendous amount at that time. A train was dispatched from Boston carrying a team
of thirteen physicians, as well as nurses, aid workers and some supplies. In appreciation of the state's efforts, the government of Nova Scotia each year donates a huge Christmas tree which graces Prudential Plaza in Boston.

Things gradually returned to some semblance of normality, though the rebuilding of the city, and more importantly, the lives of its citizens, would take many years. Many victims of the explosion would have suffered from what we today call Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). An insightful American neurologist, Dr. William McDonald, warned other health care workers that survivors often needed treatment for emotional trauma as much as for physical injury. Without therapy, PTSD sufferers are often doomed to a life of anxiety, nightmares and obsessive fear.

The Halifax Relief Commission was formed to provide support to survivors. As recently as 1989, thirty people were still receiving benefits from its fund, though the commission itself was dismantled in 1975. In 1984, a monument to the victims of the Halifax Explosion, the Memorial Bell Tower, was inaugurated on the hill at Fort Needham in the north end of Halifax. The structure, reminiscent of the silhouette of a damaged building, incorporates a carillon of bells and was dedicated as a memorial the following summer, almost sixty-eight years after the explosion. Barbara (Orr) Thompson turned the sod for the ceremony at a site not far from where she'd been blown by the blast. Also present was nonagenarian Dr. Percy McGrath, travelling once more from Kentville as he had done many years before.

And who was to blame for the disaster? Rumours of sabotage by the Germans abounded but were dismissed. Initially the
Mont Blanc
was declared to be totally at fault, but ultimately the Supreme Court of Canada declared that each of the involved vessels was equally to blame. Regardless of who was at fault, every December 6 at nine a.m. a memorial service is held at Fort Needham in memory of the explosion's many victims. And on the hour, the sounds of the carillon bells ring out over Halifax's north end, floating across the Narrows to Dartmouth to remind all of this great tragedy.

George Burden

Say Au Revoir — but Not Goodbye,” stated the front page of the Liverpool paper when Dr. John Brinkley's hundred-and-ten-foot yacht left the harbour in August of 1936.

Everyone in the small community was in awe of the American millionaire. That year, he had invited the mayor and town councillors and their wives on board his yacht, where he entertained them lavishly. And, although little was known about the man, his ostentatious lifestyle and his exceptional fishing skills had greatly impressed the townspeople. Everybody knew that Brinkley had set a new record by landing a three-hundred-and-sixty-kilogram tuna, and he had told them that he was a physician practising in Del Rio, Texas.

Years later, local historian Armand Wigglesworth, who was a young boy when he met him during one of Brinkley's visits to Liverpool, mentions this intriguing fellow in his book,
Anecdotes of Queens County, Nova Scotia
(Volume 2)
.
He writes that Dr. Brinkley always created a stir when he arrived on his magnificent yacht and reports that the doctor was reputed to have something to do with “monkey glands. A fertility scam, it was said.”

Wigglesworth was mistaken about the monkey glands. It was goat testicles that, in the 1920s and 1930s, helped make John Brinkley one of the richest fraud artists in the United States. Brinkley's story is truly bizarre; the scams he perpetrated so successfully were so outrageous that it defies logic to think he managed to get away with them for more than twenty years.

John Romulus Brinkley was born in 1885. Where he was born is debatable; whenever he applied for a medical licence, he provided different birthplaces: Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina. What we do know about this charismatic man is that he attended what were then known as

Dr. John Brinkley.
THE BRINKLEY OPERATION

“eclectic” medical schools but never earned a legitimate medical degree. History has now revealed that two of the medical diplomas he displayed prominently on his office walls were purchased for about two hundred dollars each.

In 1917, after a brief time in the military — his army record indicates that he served as a medical officer for a little more than a month — Brinkley opened a medical office in an empty drugstore in Milford, Kansas. Unbelievably, though he had little formal medical training, he was soon actively involved in a general practice and treated people afflicted with a variety of common maladies.