Snowshoe and Lancet: Memoirs of a Frontier Newfoundland Doctor
by Robert Skidmore Ecke
Category: Biography & Autobiography

Two years out of Johns Hopkins Medical School, Robert Ecke found himself at Notre Dame Bay Memorial Hospital on the island of Twillingate, Newfoundland. Practicing a form of frontier medicine, the young doctor was soon handling everything from emergency appendectomies to pregnancies. By boat, dog sled, and snowshoes, he traveled to treat people unable or unwilling to come to the hospital. Ecke's journal excerpts are engrossing: "I've been doing a lot of operating; boldly slashing a lip to take out a cancer when it would have terrified me only shortly since. I believe I am beginning to get a feeling for surgery and will try almost anything". Later, aboard ship, "It was dreadful working down in the saloon with patients sliding from side to side (on a table). I had to go ashore every once in a while to get my stomach back". With humor and compassion, he describes this challenging time with the poverty-stricken fishing, families.