Amazing Medical Stories (2 page)

The hale and hearty Duc d'Anville.
PUBLIC ARCHIVES OF NOVA SCOTIA

I
n May of 1746, the largest military force ever to set sail for the New World was secretly assembled along the French Atlantic coast and departed from Ile Aix. Under the leadership of Admiral Jean-Baptiste Louis Frederic de la Rochefoucauld, the Duc d'Anville, the fleet carried a commission from King Louis XV. They were to avenge the recent stinging defeats of the French at the hands of the English. D'Anville was ordered to “expel the British from Nova Scotia, consign Boston to flames, ravage New England and lay waste to the British West Indies.” This was a most ambitious task, but the fleet, consisting of over sixty vessels carrying approximately eleven thousand men, including four battalions of regular French line-infantry, would have been well up to the assignment. Indeed, news of this force created panic in the streets in Boston and New York and sparked mass prayer sessions in colonial churches. But for a series of medical, tactical and climatic misadventures, the Duc d'Anville might even have succeeded in eradicating the English power base in North America.

Things did not go well from the very beginning. Constant delays, possibly caused by the tardiness of shoddy and incompetent contractors, slowed the fleet's departure considerably. Substandard provisions may also have played a role in the subsequent outbreaks of disease on board ship. These delays insured a fatigued and deconditioned crew, even before leaving France. A storm in the Bay of Biscay and adverse winds slowed the trans-Atlantic crossing, the men sickened and began to die as food and drinking water deteriorated. A major storm off Sable Island wrecked and scattered the fleet, and it was a sorry lot of typhus and scurvy-ridden ships that limped into Chebucto Harbour (now Halifax) on September 10, 1746.

And this was only the beginning. Within two weeks of their arrival, the thirty-seven-year-old d'Anville suddenly sickened and died. Sources have listed his death as caused by a variety of conditions including poison, a brain tumour, apoplexy and even the treatment provided by his physicians. A letter written by d'Anville's surgeon and friend Lieutenant Duval, suggests that he fell ill with “a fit of serous apoplexy” (a stroke) sometime during the night of September 24-25 and was found in a vegetative state in his cabin at seven o'clock that morning. Treatment of the Duke proved to be unsuccessful.

On d'Anville's death, Vice Admiral d'Estournelle took command. With 2,500 men dead and much of the fleet and supplies missing, d'Estournelle's situation seemed hopeless. Despondent and discouraged, he repeated over and over, “All is lost; it's impossible.” Leaving a meeting with his officers, the depressed vice admiral returned to his cabin. At one point through the night groans were heard coming from his cabin. The officers knocked frantically on the door, then stove it in, to find d'Estournelle lying in a pool of blood, impaled on his own sword.

Third in command, Captain de la Jonquiere, now took command. The sick were brought ashore near Birch Cove in Halifax Harbour's Bedford Basin. Some recovered from scurvy with the arrival of fresh supplies from the Acadians in the Annapolis Valley, but typhus, a louse-borne fever, continued to ravage the men. The feisty Jonquiere determined to at least attempt to take the British fortress of Annapolis Royal on the opposite side of the province to snatch some element of victory. Alas, more storms and English reinforcements resulted in the failure of this plan, and Jon-quiere and the remnants of the once grand flotilla limped home to France. Of the approximately eleven thousand men who left France, only a few thousand returned. The prayers of the New Englanders had been answered and there was jubilation in the streets of Boston and New York. Typhus, scurvy, malnutrition, stroke, a brain tumour and depression; all played a role in the failure of this grand scheme of Louis XV.

Dr. Duval had treated the duke with emetics to make him vomit, purges to empty the bowel and blistering which, it was felt then, could suck poisonous substances from the body. Apparently d'Anville initially improved, perhaps due to temporary shrinkage of the tumour brought on by dehydration from his physician's treatment. He briefly regained consciousness

The cranium of the Duc d'Anville, exhumed from beneath the altar at the chapel in Fortress Louisbourg, Cape Breton, showed evidence of a brain tumour that may have caused his fatal stroke.
PARKS CANADA / FORTRESS OF LOUISBOURG NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE

and spoke, but subsequently vomited, aspirated, convulsed and died. Excess fluid in the lungs on autopsy would suggest aspiration as the immediate cause of the duke's death, brought on by loss of consciousness from the tumour-induced stroke.

Dr. Duval performed an autopsy aboard the duke's flagship,
Le Northumberland
, the only autopsy ever to be performed on a royal personage in North America, and he was subsequently buried on Georges Island in Halifax Harbour. Three years later, in 1749, Governor Edward Corn-wallis of Halifax gave permission for d'Anville's remains to be “pulled by the heels from his grave” and transferred to Louisbourg. The duke's body was interred with some pomp beneath the altar of the King's Chapel on September 17, 1749. Here the body rested until it was rediscovered in 1932 by workmen excavating the chapel. The identity of the skeleton remained
uncertain until the skull was found to house a pig's tooth, one the duke had had implanted two hundred years previously. (This was well known in d'Anville's time and prompted one wag to joke, “He spoke with the tongue of nobility… but he laughed with the smile of a pig.”)

As often happens after great disasters, the duke's tragic demise piqued the interest of latter day investigators. The skeleton was examined by Dr. J.E. Anderson of McMaster University and was reinterred in Louis-bourg in 1964. Here it remained until Halifax neurologist, Dr. Stephen Bedwell, was given permission to examine the remains and make an impression of the skull. Dr. Bedwell also traced a copy of the duke's autopsy report and in combination with his own observations makes a cogent case that the duke may have suffered from a type of brain tumour, called a meningioma. Dr. Duval's autopsy did mention an unusual calcified area (an “ossified scythe”) on one fold of the layer of tissue that covers the brain (the dura mater), precisely where one would expect to find a meningioma. Periodic swelling of the tumor would explain d'Anville's headaches and his subsequent collapse with left-sided paralysis from a tumour-associated stroke.

Some tacticians have since pointed out that the fleet would have been far more useful in supporting the Scottish insurrection of Bonnie Prince Charlie. The Highland Scots had invaded England and they might have prevailed if d'Anville had been sent across the Channel with his forces before the decisive Jacobite defeat at Culloden in the month prior to his departure.

The most tangible result of d'Anville's expedition was to prompt the British government to found the city of Halifax at Chebucto in 1749. The strong garrison here anchored the English presence, and likely prevented Nova Scotia from joining the other American Colonies when they successfully rebelled during the Revolutionary War.

Just think: but for d'Anville, we could all be saluting the Stars and Stripes right now!

George Burden

H
e did more to save the great whales than probably any other individual in history. He was a civil rights activist one hundred years before it became fashionable. He laid the foundations for the modern petrochemical industry, yet showed a keen insight into waste control and pollution prevention. Abraham Gesner was by training a physician, a GP (a general practitioner, now usually called a Family Physician) who practiced in the little town of Parrsboro in Nova Scotia almost two centuries ago. Like many talented Canadians, his story is little known to most people.

Gesner was born into genteel poverty on May 2, 1797, to Henry and Sarah Gesner. Growing up on a farm in Cornwallis, Kings County, Nova Scotia, young Abraham's education was limited, due to his family's impoverished state. By age twenty-four, the young man's situation was desperate. Without education and nearly bankrupt, he was in love with Harriet Webster, the daughter of a prosperous local physician, Dr. Isaac Webster. The young couple married, and Harriet's father agreed to bail the young man out of debt, but only if Abraham would agree to go to England to study medicine. While medicine did not especially interest Gesner, he had no other choice and soon found himself in London studying at Guy's and St. Bartholemew's hospitals. His great intellectual loves were chemistry and geology, and in addition to his medical studies, Ges-ner attended lectures on these subjects. At age thirty he returned home to set up practice in Parrsboro.

This small village, located on the Bay of Fundy, was a geological treasure trove, and Gesner interspersed his medical practice with collecting expeditions and surveys of the coal- and fossil-rich cliffs of his new home.

Dr. Abraham Gesner, the founder of the modern petrochemical industry.
NEW BRUNSWICK MUSEUM

During his wanderings, he made many friends among the Mi'kmaq in the province, and later proved to be a strong advocate for this people. Gesner was a great proponent of smallpox immunization among European and native peoples alike. He also proved to be a vocal critic of the dumping of fish offal and waste into the Bay of Fundy and later developed a technique for recycling this waste as fertilizer. In addition to ministering to local health needs, he would often liven up the isolated cabins of his clientele with the sound of his flute.

Eventually Gesner gave up his medical practice in Parrsboro, and such was his prestige in geology that in 1838 the government of New Brunswick hired him to do a geological survey of the province. By then he was acknowledged to be the greatest authority on this subject in Maritime Canada. The position also offered financial security to Gesner whose burgeoning offspring placed a large economic demand on the family.

While in New Brunswick, he set the groundwork for Canada's first museum, the Saint John Museum, with the collection he began under the auspices of the Mechanics' Institute. Gesner's son was later to relate how all winter long his father's Mi'kmaq guides lived and laboured in the attic of the family home, mounting specimens for the museum. In 1842 Gesner was honoured by Sir Charles Lyell, the great English geologist, with a request to guide him on his explorations of the Maritimes.

His years in New Brunswick were marred by a vicious and libelous letter campaign spearheaded by a jealous physician colleague, Dr. James Robb. In 1843 Gesner decided to leave the province and return to Corn-wallis, Nova Scotia. This move was no doubt fueled by his increasingly vociferous critics and by his father's increasing age and inability to manage the family farm on his own.

Although setting early productivity records in Cornwallis by using a new fertilizer he developed from apple-processing waste, the disastrous harvest of 1848 finally forced him to sell the property. Nevertheless, Ges-ner's prospects looked good, for while living in New Brunswick he had developed a process for extracting a high-quality illuminating gas, as well as an oil he called “kerosene,“ from Albertite ore. This mineral, similar to asphalt or bitumen, was named for its place of discovery, Albert County, New Brunswick.

The name kerosene derived from the Greek
keros
and
elaion
, meaning
respectively “wax” and “oil.” Kerosene proved to be an excellent and cheap alternative to whale oil for lighting purposes. Gesner also invented a type of lantern suitable for burning his new discovery. Unintentionally, he had knocked the bottom out of the whale oil market and significantly reduced the slaughter of cetaceans. Many feel that the great whales would already be extinct but for his timely discovery.

In 1846, he did a geological survey of Prince Edward Island and also had great success lecturing on his findings. Gesner was a forceful and charismatic speaker, and audiences always flocked to hear him. Not forgetting medicine entirely, Gesner also advocated that a summer cholera outbreak in Charlottetown could be stemmed by piping a clean source of fresh water from nearby Grey's Spring.