Amazing Medical Stories by George Burden Page B

superintendent of the Montreal General Hospital. He served as major in World War I and after the war moved to Alberta, where he became administrator of the Royal Alexandra Hospital and helped found the Alberta Hospital Association. James subsequently moved to the small town of Waterhole, near the Peace River. His granddaughter, Dr. Avis Fyshe Boyar, tells me he was the first person to cross the frozen Peace River in a Model T Ford while on a house call. Unfortunately, Dr. James Fyshe died of an apparent heart attack while crossing the street to his clinic in 1921. He was only forty-three.
    James’s only child, son Thomas, went on to graduate from McGill Medical School in 1936. Dr. Thomas “Tam” Fyshe had worked his way through medical school prospecting in northern Quebec; then — exhibiting the family wanderlust — he went off to Peru to work on top of a mountain as medical officer for a mining company. In order to take his annual leave, Tam Fyshe had to descend 14,000 feet on muleback along the old Inca trail to reach Lima.
    He subsequently worked in the Canadian Medical Corps during the Second World War, treating survivors of the Dieppe disaster. Later he served on the front lines in Italy, his arrival only slightly delayed when the troop carrier in which he was travelling was torpedoed and sank.
    At the termination of the war, while shipping back to Canada, Tam Fyshe met George Gilmour, the Chancellor of McMaster University, who convinced him to go to work in Hamilton. He agreed and took a position as a general surgeon at the prestigious McGregor Clinic.
    During his career, Tam Fyshe worked on an early prototype of the artificial knee and also performed the first open-heart surgery in Hamilton. His daughter, Dr. Avis Fyshe Boyar, describes him as being a very modest man who never considered his first “valve job” as anything especially extraordinary. He passed away, in 1998, at the age of eighty-nine.
    Avis is also a McGill graduate, a family physician with a special interest in palliative care. Another victim of the family adventure bug, she served a stint in China, then set up the first palliative care unit of its kind at the King’s Hospital in Saudi Arabia, and finally returned to western Canada.
    George Burden

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL
MEDICAL INVENTOR
    If you asked Alexander Graham Bell his profession, his reply until the day he died would have been, “teacher of the deaf.” All of his life he was destined to share an intimate connection with the hearing impaired; his mother became profoundly deaf later in life, and his beloved wife, Mabel, was totally deaf from the age of five, after a bout of scarlet fever. Bell’s grandfather was a pioneer of speech therapy, and his father, Alexander Melville Bell, was the inventor of a system called Visible Speech. Visible Speech used a system of symbols to represent the positioning of the palate, mouth and tongue. Even the profoundly deaf could learn to speak by using these symbols. Young Aleck showed early promise in the field of speech therapy; as a child he taught his dog to say a few rudimentary phrases by manipulating the animal’s glottis. Later, while living in Brantford, Ontario, he learned to speak fluently with the neighbouring Mohawk Indians using the Visible Speech system of his father. As a result, they initiated him into the tribe with full ceremonies.
    Aleck Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on March 3, 1847. Later his family lived in London, but after his two brothers contracted tuberculosis and died, young Aleck began to ail, and his father decided to flee the London smog for the fresh air of Upper Canada, where Aleck thrived. Later he moved to Boston to teach the hearing impaired. There he fell in love with and married one of his students, Mabel Hubbard, who encouraged her husband in all of his endeavours.
    At the age of twenty-nine, he invented and patented the telephone. This marked not the culmination but