FOREST AND STREAM 
503 
The 
HE packer or the prospector in the north 
may stop at the sight of a flag over a shack. 
If the flies are bad he will probably go in 
for fly oil. For the flag is a home-made red cross 
and the shack one of the hospitals of the north. 
These northern hospitals, known to every trapper 
in the north, are either maintained by mission 
support or are part of a chain of rough shacks 
owned by the medical contractors. They are 
built of nearly every kind of material: canvas, 
rough lumber, zinc, and roofed with trough logs, 
or built entirely of logs, and their interior fittings 
are left nearly altogether to the doctor in charge. 
The northern doctor has to be first, a Jack-of- 
all-trades, and second, a graduate in medicine. 
The head office of the company, or mission board, 
sends him a small quantity of drugs and surgical 
supplies to the nearest shipping point, and they 
either buy an old shack or let the doctor build his 
own, and then leave him to look out for himself. 
His first official act is to get a canoe or a dog 
team and go for his supplies. Sometimes he has 
to pack them some distance by that universal 
carry-all of the north, the tump line. 
It takes the doctor almost as long to get used 
to the country as it does to graduate. Sometimes 
he is sent out with a nice new degree and a pro¬ 
fessional manner to some hospital about a hun¬ 
dred and fifty miles from the nearest steel, and 
has to hike in, which begins his education. If 
he is very “green” he may expect to be met by a 
gentleman in a white suit when he arrives at the 
scene of his labors, and he may imagine that these 
labors are to be wholly professional. Instead he 
arrives at a rough shack, like any other cabin 
he passed on the way in, and is met by a profane, 
tobacco-chewing orderly in long boots and a 
slouch hat. There may be cots in the hospital of 
which he is to be chief surgeon, but often there 
will be single bunks. The floor may be of rough 
lumber, but usually it is of hewn timber. The 
young doctor may find his “patients” cutting wood 
or helping to get supper. If his predecessor is 
still there, the new man will soon learn the ropes. 
But unhappy is the lot of the new man if the 
other has gone and the orderly can’t speak English. 
The northern hospital orderly is in a class by 
himself. He can cook, put in sutures, put up 
simple prescriptions, drop timber and build a 
shack, distinguish between the man who wants 
to rest and the man who is ill, do surgical dress¬ 
ings and assist at operations, take a trip down 
the line in answer to a call when the doctor is ab¬ 
sent in another direction, fight fires, look after 
the dogs, paddle a birch bark or attend to con¬ 
tagious cases, pack in supplies, write letters for 
the patients, protect the hospital from fire, or 
make screen doors out of anything at hand. And 
he can drink like a fiend whenever he gets into 
town. This, and a disposition making it impossi¬ 
ble to stay in one place for the five years neces¬ 
sary to graduate, is sometimes the reason why 
these men do not go on and study medicine. 
If the new man is wise he will recognize the 
Northern D 
A Jack of All Trades 
By Charles L. Pitts. 
value of a good orderly and treat him as a social 
equal. He is likely to do this anyway, for within 
a week the orderly may be calling him by his 
Christian name. Unlucky is the young doctor, 
fresh from a city hospital with its respectful 
orderlies, who resents this and suggests that his 
washing is part of the work of his orderly. Any¬ 
one who has traveled north knows the answer that 
would be given to a well man’s suggestion that 
some one should wash his clothes for him. There 
are orderlies and orderlies, educated and other¬ 
wise, but an intelligent orderly, used to the coun¬ 
try, is worth more to the new doctor than his 
brand-new instruments. 
I once knew of an orderly, working for a large 
firm of medical contractors, who was left in 
charge of a bush hospital as a result of deceiving 
the firm into thinking that he was a graduate of 
London University. This was in a place where 
Typical Northern Hospital. 
the hospitals were quite close together only about 
fifty miles apart—and the most curious part of it 
was that this orderly-doctor had the best 
equipped hospital of all and was spoken of 
throughout the district as being a clever doctor. 
He was clever in some ways, and he was lucky, 
but he left without any notice at all. 
Ingenuity is the keyword to the practice of 
medicine in the north. It requires horse sense as 
well as medical knowledge to think of the best 
way to move a patient twenty miles over rough 
country. The new doctor’s knowledge of sanita¬ 
tion is likely to be shocked, and the antiseptic pre¬ 
cautions he was wont to think imperative are also 
going to be thrown overboard before he has been 
up there long. If he is the right man for the 
country he learns that he has to get along with¬ 
out sterilized towels, and that he can put up pre¬ 
scriptions without a balance. The man who has 
been in the country some time can work in a 
way that would astonish and alarm his old profes¬ 
sors. They might even consider him insane if 
they saw him dispensing strong poisons with a 
teaspoon, or pulverizing with a hammer. The 
breakage of a graduate or pestle and mortar sim- 
o c t o r 
ply compels the doctor to forget the tables and 
put up the medicine by the two G’s, “B’ guess and 
b’ gosh.” 
The city man would think that he was in a 
bunk-house, and probably he would be in what 
once had been a camp of some kind. He would 
not see distilled water, but creek water in pails— 
that is, if the city man went far enough north to 
see a real bush hospital—and he would see great 
rolls of cheap cotton wool instead of absorbent 
cotton. There would be bales of unbleached 
cotton which the doctor would make into bandages 
by rolling and cutting with a sharp butcher knife, 
and there would be cough mixture in five-gallon 
cans. If the city man stayed long enough he 
would learn something. 
Every foot of the northern hospital is taken 
up by things actually in use. There is one part 
partitioned off as a “dispensary.” Here there are 
bottles—sometimes pickle bottles of pills and 
ten-pound cans of ointments. A piece of glass 
may be the mixing slab, and a granite basin and a 
hammer may be the pestle and mortar, but they do 
the work. In these hospitals the “well as might 
be expected” phrase of the city institution is un¬ 
known. Here, if a man has a friend who is a 
patient he travels miles to see him, and then he 
sits upon the end of his cot and both he and the 
patient smoke strong tobacco. Usually the visitor 
stays the night. There are no visiting hours and 
there is no ten-minute rule. The only rule is that 
the visitor make his own bunk and help wash the 
dishes. 
There are really no rules of any kind in these 
hospitals. When a man thinks he is better he 
goes away and no one cares, unless the patient has 
a contagious disease. Then it is part of the or¬ 
derly’s work to go after him and bring him back. 
If the flies become too thick some one picks up a 
smudge can and strolls through the “ward.” If 
there are any camps near the hospital, visitors 
come over at night and play cards, and if anyone 
feels so inclined and there is plenty of coal oil he 
keeps the lights going until midnight. If both 
the orderly and the doctor are away at the same 
time, the patients look after themselves. Practi¬ 
cally the only rule is that there be no whisky in 
the hospital. It would be out of the question to 
have a number of stated rules in such a hospital, 
because the patients are altogether different from 
the patients in a city hospital. 
The treatment also is somewhat different from 
the large city institutions. If a man comes in 
with a toothache some one holds him in a chair 
and the doctor grabs his dental forceps and that 
particular tooth ceases to ache. A fracture may 
be treated with ordinary wooden splints, and 
a wound closed without using anything to deaden 
the pain, but the patients are a hardy class. The 
cases may be anything from fly bites and frost 
bites to fevers and amputations. Here there are 
no bluffs and long-winded phrases in telling a 
man what is the matter with him. If he is sick 
enough to stay, he is looked after just as tenderly 
