only for those bays which had a doctor in residence; for, when all hands 

 were engaged in fishing, cutting and drying cod, it was almost impossible 

 for these modest practitioners to obtain from the captains means of trans- 

 port from one bay to another. In these circumstances, their principal pre- 

 occupation was to use their leisure left from their reduced obligations from 

 professional duties to make some money to supplement the meagre stipend 

 allotted them, and they devised many "sidelines". One of them, who practi- 

 ced on the French Shore for many years, fished, with great skill, for lobsters 

 and canned them. 



The Newfoundland doctors rendered, nevertheless, important services. 

 One cites the devotion to duty of one of them, during a typhoid epidemic, who 

 did not hesitate to isolate himself with the sick sheltered under a turned-over 

 long-boat and restored all of them to health. 



Later it became impossible to maintain this modest supply of ten doctors. 

 In the absence of new applicants, the administration had to resign itself, in 

 1886, to admit the impossibility of enforcing the regulation. Two old New- 

 foundland doctors were assigned the practice, one on the east coast, one on 

 the west. Both gave up their duties in 1901. Thus ended a long line of mod- 

 est medical practitioners who ameliorated the rude existence of the cod fish- 

 ermen, eased their suffering, and brought to their service, in default of high 

 medical science, a good practical sense which made them truly beneficial. 



Before the disappearance of the last representatives of the medical corps 

 on the cod vessels, all the captains of the bank vessels and the greater part of 

 the vessels outfitted for the French Shore saw themselves called, by virtue of 

 the regulation, to substitute personally for the absence of a doctor aboard. 

 They were guided, in the exercise of this function, strange to their profes- 

 sional training, by very elementary principles of hygiene and medicine that 

 they received at the School of Hydrography, and still more by the contents of 

 a thin, but substantial brochure which accompanied, compulsorily, the con- 

 tents of the medicine chest: "Medical Instructions". More or less faithful 

 interpretation of the instructions and prescriptions of this manual determined 

 the care given the sick. For the mariners who mastered briefly and logically 

 these things, this supplement to high seas navigational knowledge, which per- 

 petuates itself on all the vessels of all fleets of the world not supplied with 

 doctors, constituted the regime of "book medicine". 



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