The Meet the Author Event at the Salt Spring island Public library on Thursday, May 26, was attended by a small but enthusiastic group. Everyone was interested in Medical Man and enjoyed learning about the archival material we always bring to our book launches. All were attentive during the reading of a section of the book and as always intrigued about the stories of pioneer medicine.

Inteterestingly, many of the questions turned to the "back story" . How and why did Robert decide to move from his life as an HBC trader to become a doctor, how did he meet his wife and how did a school teacher born and raised  in southern Ontario marry an HBC trader born and raised in the wilds of northern Quebec and Ontario?

Good questions, are of which reminded me that The Trader's Son  needs all of my attention. I will continue to present Medical Man at Meet the Author Events, but all of my research and writing time must  be concentrated on the next book . The Trader's Son tells the stories of the early lives of Robert and Jennie, how they grew up completely unknown to one another, leading remarkably different lives, until they met and married and immigrated from the eastern provinces to the "Wild West " of pioneer Alberta.

To that end, my semi-weekly blog posts for Medical Man will be on hiatus for the next few months...Please continue to check helenwebster.ca for coming events....next one is 2:00 to 4:30 pm on June 7 at the Royal Colwood Golf Club in Victoria. 

The following is an excerpt from a KIRKUS INDIE REVIEW of Medical Man.
For the complete review go to   KirkusReviews:Medical Man

..examines the life of Canadian physician and surgeon, Thomas Robert Ross, who practiced medicine in Alberta during the first half of the 20th century

...Webster builds two complex characters, Ross, son of a Hudson's Bay trader posseses a temperament that's suited to life on the vast empty spaces of the mountains and later, prairies. He is an exuberant restless loner. In counterpart is Jennie, a former school teacher, who suffers from fragile health and is given to bouts of depression

...But the background against which their personal saga plays turns out to be the most compelling aspect of this volume...technological changes that move Ross from horseback to automobiles, two world wars that deliver home the wounded and maimed, the gradual introduction of medical breakthroughs...insulin, vaccines,  operating room disinfection...a well organized, smoothly presented blend of fact and fiction about a pioneer doctor. Kirkus Reviews

We travelled to the up -island city of Courtenay yesterday to present Medical Man at the Courtenay branch of the Vancouver Island Regional Library.  It was a lovely day for a drive and  Courtenay is a beautiful, friendly, small city .

We were welcomed warmly at the Library. Many thanks to Matt Mukai and staff for preparing the meeting room for us. The book with its information about  coal mining towns would certainly resonate with the descendants of the coal miners of nearby Comox and Cumberland.

It was a pleasant surprise to have a visitor from Vancouver present, and one from Victoria as well.

Everyone there enjoyed the reading.  I choose a selection from 1910 from Medical Man, called,"Insanity at the Hotel and a Hanging". They are both from Robert's time as a pioneer doctor in Lethbridge, Alberta.    

​Medical Man tells the story of those times through the eyes of a physician who was there. Frontier medicine and frontier law.

 This is a photograph of my grandmother Jennie's seal. The inscription says "Dinna Forget" and when I am asked why I wrote Medical Man, the answer is contained in those words...we need to remember our history whether it is our family, our country or our place in the world.  If this story was not written, it would be lost.

The next question I often hear is, "Why did you write it as a novel, why not a bigraphy?"

The answer to that is also simple. This is a story, and I wanted readers to enjoy reading it as such, to get to know Robert and Jennie as real people who had dreams and hopes and sadness and conversations and who played a real part in Canadian history.

Their letters and journals were a wonderful way for me to to "hear" their voices and of course, I knew these people and spent many hours with them when I was a young child...a quiet child who probably overheard many conversations that I shouldn't have. I was also part of many dinner time conversations, listened to and loved my grandfather's stories, or heard him talking to my father, also a doctor, about medical matters.  

I also wanted their story to reach a larger audience than might be reached by a straight biography...thus Medical Man is a story and I wrote it as such, and almost everyone I speak to has a story to tell of their parents or grandparents,
so.... "Dinna forget".