Tales from St Anthony Part XII -- Nurse Rhodes, you are one hard arse woman

Not sure why, but here's a fire hydrant.

I bet you never heard of Nurse Rhodes?

Neither had I until I read about her in a publication I found at the local library called Among the Deep Sea Fishers, a now defunct but very readable publication of the International Grenfell Association.

In it the hospital superintendent in April 1950, Charles S Curtis MD, recounts a story of the English nurse who came to the area in 1947 living in the town of Roddickton, at the time the population was "1500 people including 500 children under 16, half the population of Labrador in this one area".

The story goes that Nurse Rhodes serviced settlements between Harbour Deep and Conche, between 50 to 70 miles away and in one year, 1949, she treated alone 4000 out-patients.

It gets better though, in the winter of 1948 she was forced to walk from Roddickton to Harbour Deep and back to treat a patient, a round trip of 100 miles.

Read that sentence again.

See what I am getting at, she walked 100 miles with dogs dragging her medicine chest over the trail and as Curtis points out, "an undertaking that the most hardy man would hesitate to make."