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Dr James Douglas (20 May 1800 - 14 Apr 1896) was the son of Rev George Douglas (b1769) and Mary, the daughter of an
Aberdeen brewer, George Mellis, who married in Aberdeen on 4th July
1799, James Douglas was born in Brechin, Angus on 20 May 1800, the birth
being registered in Aberdeen.
Dr. James Douglas, took his career in his own hands at an early age.
After attending school for a time in Scotland, he was placed by his
father in the Methodist Academy, Woodhouse Grove. Complaining that the
standard of education was below that to which he had been accustomed, he
ran away when twelve years old and was indentured to a physician in
Penrith.
At this time, it was usual for country folk to be bled every spring, and
often every autumn as well. For this, James Douglas was paid a
shilling, and this soon led to his being being independent of his
father.
After
serving his term of six years and spending one season in Edinburgh, he
entered the Medical Department of Edinburgh University. From the
beginning he showed great aptitude for his chosen profession. His first
summer holiday was spent as surgeon to a Greenland whaler. He was
graduated as a surgeon at Edinburgh and London, first entering the
services of the East India Company, but returned to England to take
medical charge of Sir Gregor MacGregor’s fatal colony to the Mosquito
Coast of Central America. More dead than alive, he was rescued from the
Black River by a Yankee skipper and taken to Boston, where he was months
recovering his health. Later, while travelling through New York, he was
held up at Utica by a break in the Canal, and, seeing the need of that
locality, practised surgery there for several years.
His success led to
his appointment as Professor of Anatomy in the Auburn Medical College,
where his duties "involved him in practices not then provided for in a
legitimate manner," and he was obliged to go to Canada in the dead of
winter, taking his young wife with him. In Canada he had a large
practice, was noted for his scientific attainments and liberal
benevolence and was the founder of the first public institution in the
Dominion for the care of the insane.
It was a fine day in the dead of winter, 1826, when a young doctor and
his wife arrived in Quebec, Canada, in a horsedrawn sleigh, galloped
around the city a few times, liked the look of it, and decided to stay
for the rest of their lives. The next day they sold their horse and
started looking around for real estate. A few days later they bought a
house.
Dr James Douglas was a refugee and a criminal who was
fleeing from the United States, the kind of man our current refugee
policies try hard to exclude. His crime was vandalizing fresh graves,
digging up the corpses and taking them home to dissect them. He was 26
years old.
At the time of his crime, Douglas was teaching surgery
and anatomy at Auburn Medical College in New York. It was a bit of a
catch-22, as his students had to do dissections to pass their surgical
examinations, but the law made it impossible to obtain enough corpses
for this purpose. It was the second time he had been caught. The first
time the judge had let him off with a warning, but this time Douglas had
made a dreadful mistake: he had thought he was digging up a poor beggar
but had instead robbed the grave of an eminent citizen. A taxi driver
(or the 19th-century equivalent) came in and recognized the dead man
left carelessly in Douglas’ office. Douglas and his wife Hannah Williams
did not wait to see how quickly word would spread. They grabbed their
toothbrushes and left that very night by sleigh for Canada. Douglas must
be one of the more outrageous characters in Canada’s medical history,
and also one of the most talented. Very shortly after he arrived in
Quebec he had established a reputation as one of the most skilled
physicians in Lower Canada.
James Douglas grew up in Scotland,
the son of a Methodist father and a Roman Catholic mother, and began his
medical studies at the tender age of 13. By the age of 18, he was
practising medicine on a Norwegian whaling ship in the Arctic, then in
India, and lateramong the Mosquito Indians of Honduras. He’d been
teaching for 2 years in the United States before his flight from the
law. Soon after arriving in Quebec, he was at it again: he started a
little school of surgery and anatomy in his house. His wife died in
1828, and he married again shortly afterward. No one has recorded what
his wives thought of the corpses being dissected in the basement; this
basement was later converted into a kitchen, as a former student records
caustically, “just for the sake of the pleasant associations.”
James Douglas was a pioneer in terms of both medical education and
practice. In 1837 he was appointed medical director of the new Military
and Emigrant Hospital, built to take in immigrants and longshoremen who
worked on the timber ships, stowing and hoisting without benefit of
mechanization. There was plenty of opportunity for practising surgery,
and under Douglas’ leadership the hospital became the best school for
surgery in the continent, with students fighting to study under him.
James Douglas had no experience whatsoever in mental health; his
expertise was in correcting clubfeet and squints. But it was he who was
asked to run the first asylum in Canada. He bought a property that,
handily, lay just next to the country residence where he liked to go
trout fishing, and began to import patients from their former
residences. Some had been chained to the floor and had not seen daylight
for 20 years. Douglas was convinced that rather than restraint, these
patients needed work, good food, fresh air, and an “unvarying system of
conciliation and kindness.” They worked at broom-making, farming,
carpentry, and weaving, and some improved to the point that they could
go home. The hospital still exists, and its patients still work in the
attached farm and the carpentry workshop. As a good Methodist, Douglas
disapproved of dancing, except when it came to his asylum. Every
Thursday there was a ball, which he and all staff attended, with an
orchestra. He provided theatre, magic lantern shows, and picnics, for
which several cast-iron cooking ranges would be hauled out into the
countryside and set up under a large tree. He adored his patients, whom
he believed were “the special objects of God’s kind providence.”
With the sound of mind, however, Douglas was less inclined to be
unvaryingly kind. Among his many nonmedical pursuits, he learned
Italian, and the teacher was expected to be in Douglas’ study at 5 AM.
His family and any guests were expected to join him for breakfast at 6.
Meanwhile Douglas was neglecting his duties at the Military and
Emigrant Hospital in favour of his beloved asylum, and Thanks to his
experience in Honduras, it was Douglas who first recognized cholera when
it arrived in 1831, Douglas who instituted the first treatment, and
Douglas who established a graveyard for the 4000 townspeople who did not
survive. He worked so hard during the three consecutive epidemics that
his health never recovered. The only full night’s sleep he ever had was
on a pile of cedar boughs on a moose-hunting expedition he made with the
Huron. In 1847 he and two colleagues started up the Lower Canada College
of Physicians and Surgeons, the first successful attempt to regulate the
profession in the country.
The following year he was the first in
Quebec city to use chloroform anesthesia.
Psychiatry and trout
fishing Douglas was not only one of Canada’s finest surgeons, he was
also one of its first psychiatrists, although the word had not yet been
invented. In the 19th century there was a gathering movement to extract
the mentally ill from the prisons and hospitals in which they were
languishing and put them in special asylums. Mental illness was now
being attributed to alcoholism, city life, and heredity (in modern
terms, a combination of environment and genetics) rather than to demonic
possession.
by 1850 the hospital was rocked by accusations of
theft and sexual abuse. The superintendant was found to be stealing food
from patients to feed some pigs that he kept out back. A Royal
Commission set up to study the place in 1851 found the wards dark and
stuffy, the kitchen floors awash in mud and water, and that while James
Douglas was an excellent surgeon, he was also a tyrannical bully.
Douglas had respiratory problems, and prescribed for himself nine
winters in a row in Egypt, taking along his wife and children and often
a few cousins for good measure. He became renowned there too as a good
doctor, and one year he cured an Arab slave trader of pneumonia,
whereupon the grateful patient offered to send a hippopotamus to Quebec
in payment. “It was not the first time,” wrote his son, “that my father
refused a fee.”
Taking his mummies with him Douglas never quite
got over his fascination with dead bodies. He brought two mummies back
from Egypt, which caused a small stir in Quebec city. He dramatically
unveiled the head of a dead Egyptian princess during a lecture he was
giving in the local library one evening, and, as reported by the paper,
young men vied to obtain a tress of her magnificent long hair, which
they kept in golden lockets hung from their watch chains.
Douglas
was very fond of his mummies, and his son complained they had to cart
them about with them everywhere they went. As an old man Douglas went to
live with this long-suffering son. He of course brought his beloved
mummies with him, and set them up in the porch of the house, claiming
that they effectively put off potential burglars. A very generous man,
Douglas loathed banks and never kept his money in them. He gave much of
it away, including a generous endowment to the library at which he had
unveiled his dead princess, and another to what is now the Douglas
Hospital in Verdun. But as a result of rash investments in some mines in
the Eastern Townships that never panned out, he died penniless.
In a book of memoirs, Douglas’ son wrote a stirring homage to his
father’s skill (and by the way, a warning against the golden calf of
evidence-based medicine): “… that marvellous medical skill and keen
instinct, which a practitioner, who has been for half a century in
contact with disease, acquires, he knows not how, and which he cannot
describe or communicate. It must be buried with him, to be gathered
afresh through experience by the next generation.”
His son, James took on some of
his business interests.
His son, George, was
Superintendant of the Gross Ile Quarantine Station.
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