"What if Grenfell had Died Adrift on that Ice-pan?"
— N.Q.
Dr. Jim Connor: "That was in 1908, a hundred years ago. As a professor of history I have to qualify that no one knows what could have happened, it is speculative, but, if you're going to have fun, have fun, and the more I thought about this question the more intrigued I was by it.
In the decade or so Grenfell had been in Labrador and St. Anthony he had set up a good platform for his medical activities. And he had certainly managed to garner attention. There is an article, by Norman Duncan, in Harper's Monthly, in 1904, called "Grenfell of the Medical Mission". He was fashioning a reputation and a mystique of the North. The West had been taken care of, everyone had been to Vancouver, to San Francisco, there was no frontier left in the West, so people looked upwards for the new frontier. It was an outdoorsy mystiqueness, Grenfell leaping from ice-pan to ice-pan. He represented a muscular Christianity and a muscular medicine. This was a genre of outdoor life with hunting and shooting and fishing. This was a place where a young man could prove his mettle.
Clearly, by 1908, Grenfell had tapped into a mystique that was being built around him, but he still had not done his great work. He was the focus of the philanthropy that supported his mission. In a way that was a good thing — he was a larger than life guy. But the catastrophe of 1908 would have been that in the absence of Grenfell the man, Grenfell the organization collapses. It was all identified with the man. If Grenfell died on that ice-pan, the North lost a doctor, but he probably could have been replaced as a doctor. But not as the persona around whom the whole thing coalesced. No one else had that lightning-rod personality. Other doctors were tough and resourceful, but not as brash as he was. He was a man of his time and he helped create those times. It would have degenerated into just another medical mission. It would have maybe survived, but without the pizzazz.
In Adrift On An Ice-Pan, Grenfell wrote about the fear of wasting opportunity Before, he'd been successful, but haphazard. Now he went into turbo-drive. His work had extra oomph.
In 1914 when the International Grenfell Association was created; it was a corporation. Before, there had been two separate entities, in Britain and the U.S. And I think both the British and American directors got a fright when they realized that Grenfell had nearly died, and they realized how much was supported by his personality. Grenfell was it — yet he was an impetuous guy. They would need some [business] infrastructure to survive in a corporate way.
Also, in 1908, when Grenfell was adrift on the ice-pan, it's clear he realized he was having a "near-death experience." After his rescue he apparently was a bit depressed, which was unusual for him. Within a year he married after a whirlwind romance — and by whirlwind I mean after four days — a young woman, half his age, Anna Elizabeth Caldwell MacClanahan. In 1910 he writes What Life Means To Me. Clearly he was making up for lost time.
If Grenfell had perished then, of course, he never would have married. There would never have been another generation of Grenfells. And there would not have been a Mrs. Grenfell at St. Anthony: she brought style; she brought a business sense to the place; and appears to have been the only person who could moderate her husband. Her presence was beneficial.
There are other medical heroes, like Frederick Banting or Norman Bethune, that, when they died, the world sensed a loss. But it kept on spinning. Grenfell's loss would have been much more appreciable. A lot of things might not have happened. By 1908 Jessie Luther had started the industrial arts program, but she was devoted to Grenfell, and if he had died she might have left, and there would not be the traditional Grenfell coats and arts and crafts that brought money to the place, and culture and identity. Grenfell brought such international concentration to this part of the world.
And the real biographies come after 1908. He had built the myth by then, but after that date he became a legend."
Dr. Jim Connor is John Clinch Professor of Medical Humanities and History of Medicine at Memorial University.
