Amazing Medical Stories Read Free

d’Anville, we could all be saluting the Stars and Stripes right now!
    George Burden

ABRAHAM GESNER
A DOCTOR AHEAD OF HIS TIME
    H e did more to save the great whales than probably any other individual in history. He was a civil rights activist one hundred years before it became fashionable. He laid the foundations for the modern petrochemical industry, yet showed a keen insight into waste control and pollution prevention. Abraham Gesner was by training a physician, a GP (a general practitioner, now usually called a Family Physician) who practiced in the little town of Parrsboro in Nova Scotia almost two centuries ago. Like many talented Canadians, his story is little known to most people.
    Gesner was born into genteel poverty on May 2, 1797, to Henry and Sarah Gesner. Growing up on a farm in Cornwallis, Kings County, Nova Scotia, young Abraham’s education was limited, due to his family’s impoverished state. By age twenty-four, the young man’s situation was desperate. Without education and nearly bankrupt, he was in love with Harriet Webster, the daughter of a prosperous local physician, Dr. Isaac Webster. The young couple married, and Harriet’s father agreed to bail the young man out of debt, but only if Abraham would agree to go to England to study medicine. While medicine did not especially interest Gesner, he had no other choice and soon found himself in London studying at Guy’s and St. Bartholemew’s hospitals. His great intellectual loves were chemistry and geology, and in addition to his medical studies, Ges-ner attended lectures on these subjects. At age thirty he returned home to set up practice in Parrsboro.
    This small village, located on the Bay of Fundy, was a geological treasure trove, and Gesner interspersed his medical practice with collecting expeditions and surveys of the coal- and fossil-rich cliffs of his new home.

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    Dr. Abraham Gesner, the founder of the modern petrochemical industry. NEW BRUNSWICK MUSEUM
    During his wanderings, he made many friends among the Mi’kmaq in the province, and later proved to be a strong advocate for this people. Gesner was a great proponent of smallpox immunization among European and native peoples alike. He also proved to be a vocal critic of the dumping of fish offal and waste into the Bay of Fundy and later developed a technique for recycling this waste as fertilizer. In addition to ministering to local health needs, he would often liven up the isolated cabins of his clientele with the sound of his flute.
    Eventually Gesner gave up his medical practice in Parrsboro, and such was his prestige in geology that in 1838 the government of New Brunswick hired him to do a geological survey of the province. By then he was acknowledged to be the greatest authority on this subject in Maritime Canada. The position also offered financial security to Gesner whose burgeoning offspring placed a large economic demand on the family.
    While in New Brunswick, he set the groundwork for Canada’s first museum, the Saint John Museum, with the collection he began under the auspices of the Mechanics’ Institute. Gesner’s son was later to relate how all winter long his father’s Mi’kmaq guides lived and laboured in the attic of the family home, mounting specimens for the museum. In 1842 Gesner was honoured by Sir Charles Lyell, the great English geologist, with a request to guide him on his explorations of the Maritimes.
    His years in New Brunswick were marred by a vicious and libelous letter campaign spearheaded by a jealous physician colleague, Dr. James Robb. In 1843 Gesner decided to leave the province and return to Corn-wallis, Nova Scotia. This move was no doubt fueled by his increasingly vociferous critics and by his father’s increasing age and inability to manage the family farm on his own.
    Although setting early productivity records in Cornwallis by using a new fertilizer he developed from apple-processing waste, the