Wilfred Grenfell

Sir Wilfred Thomason Grenfell ( born February 28, 1865 in Parkgate on the Wirral Peninsula, England; † October 9, 1940 in Charlotte, Vermont ) was a physician and missionary. He went to medical school in London in 1892 in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador and carried there by his lifelong work crucial to the establishment of a modern health and social work at.

Life

Wilfred Grenfell was born on February 28, 1865 in North West England, the son of Algernon Grenfell, an Anglican priest, and Jane Grenfell born in Hutchinson. He attended the Mostyn House School in his birthplace of Parkgate. After moving to London in 1882, he began a year later to study medicine at the local London Hospital Medical School, from which he graduated six years later. In London in 1885 he came in contact with the teachings of the American evangelist Dwight Lyman Moody, who emphasized in his sermons, among other redemption through service to the poor of society. This had a great impact on Grenfell's religious beliefs and his whole future life. In 1886 he converted from Anglicanism of his parents to the Protestant faith.

In 1892 he was commissioned by the Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen to Newfoundland, there to set up a medical mission. This took a year later its operation with two other doctors and two nurses in two small hospitals in Battle Harbour and Indian Harbour as well as a mobile medical care by ship along the coast of Labrador on. The activities of the mission expanded with the passage of time on the medical care of the population amounts to the establishment of schools and orphanages, as well as projects in the field of social work and the supply of workers. From 1905, the mission ran a donated by American industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie mobile library. In addition, the Mission assisted in addition to the local fishermen and the local population, and other settlers on the coast of Labrador and northern Newfoundland. On November 18, 1909 married Wilfred Grenfell his wife Anne Elizabeth Caldwell MacClanahan from Chicago. The marriage produced two sons and a daughter were born.

Due to the growth of the mission in the following decades, the International Grenfell Association was formed on 10 January 1914 as the charitable mission society in order to support the work of Wilfred Grenfell. Since the financial needs exceed the resources provided by the Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen, he campaigned through lecture tours in Canada, the U.S. and England, as well as books and other publications, a further donations. His works included both religious scriptures and landscape and travel descriptions of Newfoundland and Labrador as well as fiction stories, such as the work in 1908 published " Adrift on to Ice Pan". This was based on an experience where in 1908 he survived a night on a drifting ice floe.

During the First World War, he served from 1915 to 1916 voluntarily in the Royal Army Medical Corps. With the beginning of the 1920s, his health deteriorated. In 1926 he had a heart attack, the first in 1929 followed by a second. In 1931 he undertook a journey to map the coast of Labrador. In 1935 he retired from the management of the Association, and three years later his wife died. When he sat down to rest, passed in Labrador as a result of his ministry six hospitals, seven nursing stations, two orphanages, two large schools and 14 commercial centers. After his death on October 9, 1940 in the State of Vermont, his remains were transferred to St. Anthony in Newfoundland and buried there on 25 July 1941.

Aftermath and Remembrance

The International Grenfell Association was about the death of Wilfred Grenfell addition to 1981 as a non -governmental organization. Your responsibilities in the area of ​​health care were then taken over by a designated as Grenfell Regional Health Services Board state agency. The International Grenfell Association subsequently shifted its task focus on the promotion of projects and the training of medical staff.

In 1978, the Sir Wilfred Thomason Grenfell Historical Society was founded, which bought his house in St. Anthony, Newfoundland and Labrador and in einrichtete a museum and an archive. The work of Wilfred Grenfell valid as a model for at least two characters in works of Canadian literature, for a Dr. Luke in the 1904 book " Doctor Luke of the Labrador " by Norman Duncan and on the other Tocsin Dr. Harold Horwood book " White Eskimo, "which was published in 1972.

Wilfred Grenfell received a number of top awards, such as 1907, the first ever awarded honorary doctorate from the Medical Faculty of the University of Oxford for his work. In the same year he was admitted as a Companion in the Order of Saint Michael and George, an award for British citizens, which is awarded for outstanding service while casting abroad or for the improvement of relations with other states. For his work on the mapping of Labrador, he was honored by the Royal Geographical Society in 1911 with the Murchison Prize. In 1927 he was knighted in recognition of his achievements in the field of medicine, education and social work.

Located in Corner Brook, Newfoundland and Labrador Campus Memorial University of Newfoundland, Sir Wilfred Grenfell College since 1979 is called. Since 1987, a search and rescue ship of the Canadian Coast Guard also carries his name. In 1997, he was inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame.