Service on the Skeena: Horace Wrinch, Frontier Physician

His name was Horace Wrinch. It was 1880. He was fourteen years old, a farmer’s boy from England travelling on his own to Quebec. Twenty years later, a qualified doctor and newly married surgeon, he arrived in Hazelton on the Skeena River in northern British Columbia. In 1904, Horace built the first hospital in the northern interior of the province, which until his arrival had no resident doctors, no surgeons and no hospital. Over the next thirty-two years, he became widely respected as a do...