Saddlebag Surgeon — Robert Tyre

Surgery today is performed in hospitals, in bright, sterile operating-theatres where the surgeon works with a team of skilled assistants and has at his instant command a great variety of life-saving apparatus and drugs for use in sudden emergency. Until he opened his first one in the small town of Dominion City, Manitoba, in 1901, Dr. Murrough O'Briens had no hospital for his surgical cases. The call to use his knife almost always came at moments of emergency. By lamplight, in the wretched huts of frightened immigrants, he did his surgery on a bed or a kitchen table. A basin on the stove boiled his instruments, and the trembling hand of a family member or a neighbor dripped chloroform to the gauze-masked patient while the scalpel began its work. To the saddlebag surgeons, such dramatic situations were a matter of routine; so were hardships and difficulties of many different kinds. Murrough O'Brien was to find this out when he left England for Canada in 1890 after arousing the disapproval of his family by failing his final examinations at medical school. After several years of adventure he finished his medical training at Manitoba Medical College and set up his first surgery in a shack behind a Chinese laundry in Dominion City, Manitoba. The story of his medical practice on the Canadian prairies is indeed and absorbing one.