TODAY, MOST COMMUNITIES HAVE PLANS TO DEAL WITH MASS-casualty incidents, but these plans usually assume the injured will be at one controlled location. They also assume the movement of injured to medical centres will be done in an orderly way. Trained medical personnel will go to the site and sort the victims, looking after those who need immediate help, sending to hospital those whose needs are greatest or who can benefit the most from immediate treatment. The responders will keep the hospitals informed about what is happening on site, and what patients are en route. As those who have watched medical television series, such as the wartime comedy-drama M*A*S*H, will know, the process is called triage.
Plans of that kind may make sense for site-specific incidents such as train wrecks or air crashes. They have little relevance in disaster, and no relevance for catastrophic situations such as the 1917 explosion. In Halifax, most of the initial medical treatment was as informal as the initial search and rescue. For example, while a sailor from Niobe was on his way home to search for his children, he stopped and bandaged a girl’s injured leg. Then, at St. Joseph’s School, when he discovered Sister Cecilia Lawrence with a broken leg, he applied a makeshift splint and carried her to the sisters’ residence. From there, she was taken to hospital by ambulance. Before the sailor arrived at St. Joseph’s, the school children had been responding on their own. When falling debris temporarily blinded Sister Rita, she called for help and two children heard her, found her, and helped her from the wreckage. Students also rescued Sister Frances. At another school, Evelyn Richardson watched her father help students. “Dad was at his desk,” she recalls, “bandaging the gashed thumb of one boy, while another stood waiting and watching, a bright red stain spreading across the clothing that already bound his wrist.”
In Richmond, where the Boston Express came to a halt, passengers ripped up towels, sheets, and curtains from the Pullman cars to make bandages. Then they drained water from the boiler to bathe the wounds because the victims were so dirty. Arthur Goldberg was one of the passengers:
We took about 250 of the injured on board the train and gave them what medical aid we could. All the passengers turned doctor. The first one I treated was a little girl. She could not see. Her eyes were filled with glass. I got the glass out, but she couldn’t see. She was blind. The glass had cut into her eyeballs. She was a brave little mite. She didn’t cry one bit.
There was a mother with two babies in her arms. Her face was covered with blood but she kept wiping the blood from her eyes, hugging her babies to her breast all the while. We took the babies from her in order that we might dress her wounds with bandages made from the Pullman bed linen. The two babies were dead. We didn’t tell the mother but put the little ones away in a berth.
A travelling salesman from Montreal, Charles Clark, who knew a little first aid, had brandy and used that to calm a few victims. He managed to bandage about fifty injured. The conductor saved one woman’s life by stopping a hemorrhage. The train stopped just above Pier 9, where the Calonne had been loading ammunition. Eight of her crew came for help. Elsewhere, others also did what they could with makeshift material. A woman took pins from a baby’s diaper and used them to hold bandages together. Roy Laing got plaster from a drugstore and gave it to the injured: “I can’t describe the sights to you. All I could do was to call in the drug store, and get some plaster … and give it to all I came across that it would do any good.” Some children ran to their parents for help. One child had a sliver of glass in her face. Her mother pulled it out, leaving a small scar. Audley Griffin’s mother—Griffin was the boy who decided to skip school so he could see where the fire engines were going—sewed her son’s finger back on with silk thread. Years later, Griffin—who became a physician—told his patients his finger healed “as good as new.”
While much of the assistance was informal, it was not necessarily amateurish. St. John Ambulance was organized in Halifax in 1912. By 1917, more than 1000 people had been trained in first aid, home nursing, or both. Some had gone to war—the largest brigade of volunteers to go overseas came from Halifax—but 129 were still in Halifax when Mont-Blanc exploded. Sixty-two worked in and around their own homes, stopping bleeding, removing glass, covering wounds, and splinting broken legs and arms. Trained soldiers helped. At the Wellington Barracks, Lieutenant C.A. McLennan of the Composite Battalion (who later supervised work at the magazine) was watching the fire with three others. When Mont-Blanc exploded, “I was knocked down but not knocked out. I immediately dropped into the moat and escaped being hit by flying steel. When the fragments stopped falling I ran to where I had been standing and found Lieutenant Balcom lying on the ground with a broken leg. I at once secured two stretcher-bearers with a stretcher.” Despite this help, Lieutenant Harold Balcom died.
While McLennan was trying to help Balcom, the medical orderlies, Corporal John Hogbin and Private Robert M. Drysdale, began treating the hundreds of wounded among the soldiers and their families. It took four hours to tend to the injured survivors. When they finished, the two soldiers used their remaining supplies to set up a first-aid station on Gottingen Street, opposite the barracks. They kept going until six o’clock, when supplies ran out. They lasted that long only because Acting Sergeant-Major Archibald Ansty grabbed the panniers (containers) full of medical supplies and carried them from the burning building. All three of these emergency responders were experienced soldiers, not untypical of the men who had returned from overseas and been assigned to garrison duty at Halifax. Hogbin had been in the British army for twelve years, including a campaign on the Indian frontier, transferred to the Canadian permanent force in 1905, and went overseas in 1915, but proved physically unfit for service at the front. Drysdale had served with the infantry in France where he was wounded in the face and gassed. Ansty had served in Canadian military hospitals in France and the Mediterranean, where he was decorated, but became ill with malaria and dysentery.
Soldiers set up four first-aid huts by the armouries, two run by military personnel, two run by civilians: “Streams of wounded people were coming from all directions toward the medical hut for treatment. There was hardly anything left of that hut that was not blown to pieces but soon they procured supplies from the Halifax hospital. This hospital being some distance away from the explosion was not much damaged.” Medical supplies for the huts were procured by Captain William St. Clair Ingraham of the 1st Depot Battalion, Nova Scotia Regiment, who commandeered a vehicle and got them from Cogswell Street Military Hospital.
There was another dressing station at the Citadel set up by Major A.M. Bauld, quarter-master of the 1st Regiment, Canadian Garrison Artillery. It became more crowded after the warning of a second explosion. It was there that Gladys Harris took her four children after she had rescued them from the wreckage of her home. The same Captain Ingraham who procured medical supplies found warm broth for his patients, and even posted their names on the doors to assist those searching for missing family members.
While this assistance was all valuable, many victims needed more professional help. They often got that by going to physicians’ homes, which were soon packed with injured. Annie Anderson, a medical student at Dalhousie, was boarding with her uncle, Dr. M.S. Dickson, in Dartmouth. He was ill in bed: “The house was filled in a short time with injured people needing attention. [Dr. Dickson] was buried in bed under glass and plaster, but was not injured beyond three little cuts. The house was full of bleeding and hurt people from morning to night. The second alarm was communicated…. Dr. D. moved his operating table out to the corner of the street…. He was amputating an arm.” The other Dartmouth physicians did the same. In his privately published book, The Story of Dartmouth, John Patrick Martin writes that a boy named Russell Urquhart was placed on the street on a pile of fur coats. While Urquhart’s mother threaded the needles, a Dr. Smith put twenty-two stitches in the cuts around the boy’s eye.
In Halifax, Kelly Morton found the scene at his home similar to the one at Dr. Dickson’s home in Dartmouth:
Reaching my home where my father had his office, I found it crowded with suffering children and adults awaiting the attention of my dad, who attended patients all day and into the night. Almost all windows in our house were blown out. The dividing wall between the front parlour and my father’s office was detached at the ceiling by the blast and was tilted. In my attic bedroom, the glass from the two windows, shattered in spears, was implanted in the south wall over my bed.
At Dr. MacIntosh’s home, his spouse, Clara, was at home alone: “In an instant, walls, ceilings, plaster, glass, furniture, etc., were in turmoil and wounded from the whole neighborhood were rushing into the house looking for my husband…. Telephones were out of order, the house was filled with injured, but while attending emergency cases such as controlling hemorrhage, etc. I sent the first able-bodied man with a team to get in touch with the nearest members [of St. John Ambulance] and ask them to report to the nearest hospitals.”
Clara MacIntosh was also lady superintendent of St. John Ambulance. In addition to looking after its concerns while she waited for her husband, she got a woman to sweep the floor and managed to control some of the patients’ bleeding. Her husband arrived forty minutes later.
At one physician’s home, the first arriving victims discovered Dr. Murdoch Chisholm covered in blood. Thinking he was dead, they went to the home of another physician. When they mentioned what they had seen, that physician left his own patients, rushed to Chisholm’s office and found him alive but unconscious from loss of blood. After stitching an artery, he took Chisholm to the Victoria General Hospital. Chisholm lived to see his name featured as one of those who died in the explosion. He was not the only injured person to receive priority treatment.
A cadet from the Royal Naval College helped a classmate get to Cogswell Street Military Hospital, where someone stitched the cuts on his face. Then he discovered another cadet, Kenneth Alexander Mackenzie, lying in a bed, his eyes covered with a bandage. Mackenzie wanted to go to the home of Professor MacMechan who, as well as teaching at Dalhousie, taught naval history. (Mackenzie’s father was a professor at the University of Toronto.)
Taking advantage of the confusion, I got him out and into an old army model T Ford that had an army driver. He didn’t need much persuasion to take us where we wanted and very soon Mac was getting attention from one of the best eye specialists. I was fortunate enough to remember that Dr. Weatherby [sic; actually Weatherbe] lived not far off, and managed to catch him before he left home. He was able to save the sight of one eye, but Mac would have to find another career in life.
Dr. Weatherbe operated while Mackenzie lay on a couch at MacMechan’s home. Another cadet, Edward Orde, was taken to Government House, where Grant’s daughters nursed him and managed to save one eye.
Since most physicians normally helped staff the hospitals, their work at home left the hospitals short-handed. Weatherbe was delayed in getting to hospital because he was looking after Cadet Mackenzie at MacMechan’s home. Dr. Dickson was delayed because he was helping patients at his home and on the street. It was evening before he finally made it to the Nova Scotia Hospital. Similarly, it was hours before Kelly Morton’s father, Captain A. McD. Morton, medical officer of the 1st Regiment, Canadian Garrison Artillery, reached Camp Hill. After clearing up his own patient load, he went to the emergency medical centre at the Citadel before finally reaching Camp Hill. (Later that night, Morton went to help some friends set by hand the type for the next day’s newspaper. Perhaps he found it a relief after a day of anguish.)
Another physician, Dr. M.J. Burris of Dartmouth, treated people at his home, moved out onto the street when there was word of a second explosion, responded to specific calls for help, and then, at 2 a.m., finally went to the Nova Scotia Hospital, which had about 250 injured. When supplies ran short, Burris stitched wounds without anaesthetic. He injected strychnine to calm his patients. Some physicians moved from place to place. Dr. J.J. McDougall operated at Camp Hill, the Victoria General, and the Halifax Infirmary. When the YMCA hospital opened, he took over most major surgical cases there, operating when other doctors had been unable to achieve satisfactory results.
There was also professional medical help from some ships in harbour. Temporary Surgeon W.H. Blackburn, a Royal Navy physician from Changuinola, used a boat to reach Highflyer, and then went to Picton, where he helped thirteen of her surviving longshoremen onto the tug Booton. Two died within minutes. Five were only slightly injured and were transferred to another tug. The remaining six were bundled into blankets secured from nearby homes and taken by wagon to the Victoria General. The US Navy ship Old Colony escaped damage when debris from Mont-Blanc landed in the water to her port and starboard but failed to hit her. Her captain organized 125 men into search parties. In a few hours, they took fifty-four injured on board. Unfortunately, there was no physician to tend to them: Old Colony’s doctor, Surgeon H.C. Petterson, had gone to assist at Camp Hill. By mid-afternoon, seventeen of the fifty-four were dead. At one o’clock, Booton towed Old Colony from Dartmouth to the naval docks in Halifax, where Blackburn, the physician from Changuinola, boarded her and started treating the victims who were still alive. Jennings, a surgeon from Highflyer, joined him. Highflyer looked after her own injured and took on others from nearby vessels.
While some people were digging victims from the rubble, others were taking them to hospital or anyplace they could get medical attention. John Crerar MacKeen, who later became prominent in business and head of Nova Scotia Light and Power, was in 1917 an officer cadet enrolled at the Royal Military College of Canada. When Mont-Blanc exploded, MacKeen was leaving by car for the city centre, so he was one of the first to try to reach the North End. He was able to get as far as the Wellington Barracks, but after that the road was impassable because of debris, downed telephone and power poles, and fire. He rolled back the top of his car, found a piece of picket fence to serve as a stretcher, teamed up with two sailors and a soldier, and turned his car into an ambulance: “The small public square at the head of Young Street and Gottingen Street was being filled up by the dead and wounded being brought up as could be managed from the wrecked and burning buildings. There was no difficulty in filling the car, load after load as quickly as possible, taking them to the nearest hospital.” MacKeen noted no other sign of organized relief. Later, he commented that “the Military headquarters, who had a large number of people under their control, did not function during the first hours of the disaster.” (He was unaware how bad things were at Wellington Barracks and the Armouries.)
Edith Bauld drove her car to the North End out of curiosity. She, too, started using her car as an ambulance: “Took twelve injured people to hospital in one trip. Some were standing on the running board…. Some were unconscious from loss of blood. Some children had lost eyes…. Their wounds had been dressed with filthy rags…. Some had their clothes torn off.” She had no idea how many people she chauffeured: “It seemed like thousands but it can’t have been more than 100.” As well as taking injured to various hospitals and to Old Colony, she later helped the army move medical supplies from Cogswell Street to Camp Hill.
Ralph Proctor also had a car, but it was buried in debris at his home on Gottingen Street. About twenty-five minutes after the explosion, some soldiers helped him dig it out and he, too, became an ambulance driver. He estimates that he made twenty-three trips back and forth to Camp Hill. One female passenger had both breasts cut off. Another girl was naked and bathed in blood—cuts everywhere on her body. A five-year-old child had a broken spine. One man had his jugular cut. Proctor managed to stop the bleeding and save the man’s life, but another passenger, a man with a crushed side, died en route to hospital. Another driver was C.J. Burchell, a lawyer who was later retained to represent IMO at the inquiry, and still another was Samuel Henry Prince, though there is no record of his experiences.
While some drove their own vehicles, others grabbed whatever transport was available. One of Annie Greenough Chapman’s brothers, Charlie, worked at the railway shops. Although he was tossed in the air by the explosion, he was only slightly injured. On his way home, he met a man with a horse and wagon hauling lumber. Charlie asked to use the cart to transport wounded. The man refused, so Charlie took it from him. The first passenger was Charlie’s niece, Rita, eight, who was badly cut. She died four days later. “Everyone was trying to put their wounded on and it became full in no time with one person piled on the other. There was blood everywhere. One young priest (a boy we had played with when we were kids) put his mother on the wagon and laid her head on my lap. I’ll never forget what she looked like. A piano had fallen through the floor and on her face.” When one woman the Greenoughs picked up died a few minutes later, they took her body off the cart and laid it in the gutter. They wanted room for others who were still alive.
Because the demand for medical help was so great, temporary shelters were set up at St. Paul’s Hall, the YMCA, St. Mary’s College, at the Knights of Columbus Hall, and on board the Furness-Withy ship, Kanawha. (No one thought of using the ships in Bedford Basin, such as the Dutch passenger liner Nieuw Amsterdam.) At the YMCA, the regular residents left their rooms so that they could be used for the homeless. The assembly room was turned into a hospital ward, the library into an operating room. While physicians stitched up injuries and even performed minor surgery—Alan Cunningham removed an injured eye—volunteers with first-aid training bandaged those with less severe injuries. A team of women volunteers, including the wife of the lieutenant-governor, found enough coal to keep the stove going to keep warm a pot of tomato soup. They also served cheese sandwiches. The woman who took over as head nurse had not nursed for sixteen years.
At the Knights of Columbus Hall, Jessie Parker, a nurse who came in from Kentville, managed to take care of most problems, though she needed a doctor to treat some of the burn cases and to sew up an eyelid that was falling down. (It needed six stitches and there was no anaesthetic.) Inmates took injured to Rockhead Prison, later declared uninhabitable, and eighty to ninety injured showed up at Presbyterian College, now a convalescent hospital for soldiers. In Dartmouth, Imperial Oil opened its construction shacks and took in sixty-eight women and 116 children, and looked after them until mid-January. It also supplied a trained nurse. Another sixty-two injured were taken in at Dartmouth’s home for the indigent.
Inevitably, given the limited resources, many did not get the help they needed. One of the first outside physicians to respond noted that “large numbers died from hemorrhages and shock before any help could be afforded.” The situation was just as bad on ships. On Niobe, for example, the injured were lying on the deck. There was no place else for them. “I had seen this man with a bandage on his face, walk up and down, pace up and down. He couldn’t talk, he had so many bandages on his face, he paced up and down, all day long and that night he just lay down on the deck and died.”
All this activity did not prevent enormous pressure on the hospitals: some of the scenes were unbelievable. A fourteen-year-old grocery-store delivery boy carried a cartload of victims from place to place, trying to find some place to let them off. An armed soldier had ordered him to take the people to hospital. He just wanted to go home to his family. Finding no room at Cogswell Street Military Hospital or at Camp Hill, he ended up at the Victoria General. He was told it was full. He started to cry. Someone told him it was all right, the hospital would take his patients. The cart was unloaded and the patients were placed on the only place left, the hospital steps. It was a cold December day. Recalled Dr. G.H. Murphy, as quoted in MacMechan’s report: “The ground in front was jammed with autos, wagons and every conveyance capable of carrying a sufferer. The hallways and office and every bit of floor space in the hospital were littered with human beings with all degrees and manners of wounds and injuries…. Besides those brought on stretchers, was an army of walking victims seeking some kind of first aid.”
Similarly, Bertha Archibald, a pharmacist at the Victoria General, recounted:
Soon patients came in droves, some on foot, and others brought in various conveyances. The whole building was filled, every bed, every cot, every stretcher, then when no more were available, the wounded and the dying were laid gently on the floor of the wards, the halls, the offices and the basement—not the basement as it is today but a dark, dirt cellar. Wagons laden with little children were brought to the hospital and everyone who could lent a hand to get them into the building. Most of them were taken to Ward 45. Their little faces and hands were black … from the powder burns, and their clothes tattered and torn. About the second day, the nurse in charge of the operating room came to the dispensary and with tears in her voice remarked, “Can not something be done? We can not handle all these cases. Can not some be sent to Camp Hill?”
Archibald, like those with her, was so involved in her own tasks that she was unaware of what was happening elsewhere. In fact, the scene at Camp Hill was, if anything, worse:
Every few minutes more casualties were being brought across the Commons from the stricken North End of the city and dumped down at Camp Hill. The windows had all been blown out. The cold wind blew in. The hospital doors had been blown off…. It was a scene of utter chaos and horror. The injured were being laid down anywhere space could be found—on the few beds, in between the beds, on the floors of the corridors, on the long kitchen tables, bundled in grey army blankets and every sort of wrap or rags…. There was hardly room even to stand….
I ended up in a small room, evidently designed to be a dental infirmary with a tangle of dental machinery and dental chairs. But between this tangle of equipment there were about thirty to forty injured people on the floor, some with severe injuries such as a broken leg or a breast smashed. They were bleeding, moaning in agony and, for all I knew, about to die … so there I stayed in that little room for the rest of the day and night though there was little enough I was able to do for them. (Dorothy McMurray, Voluntary Aid Division, St. John Ambulance)
One patient on the floor at Camp Hill was the driver of the fire engine Patricia, Billy Wells. It was two days before he had a bed.
Because of the shortage of physicians, nurses, and medical supplies, anyone who showed up was immediately put to work. When Marjorie Moir arrived at Camp Hill, she saw a man who looked like a doctor and asked him if she could help. He got her to hold a woman’s feet while he bandaged her. Both of the women’s legs were slit from ankle to knee. Moir did as asked, but was shocked at how dirty the woman was. (She had no idea that almost all victims had been drenched by black rain.) When the doctor finished, he asked her if she was a VAD (a trained Voluntary Aid Division nurse). She said no, just an ordinary person, so he got a nurse to take her to assist in the kitchen. After doing that for a while, she again found herself assisting with surgery. She would hold the instruments. Though she had never been involved in anything like that, she said it was “interesting.” In addition to these untrained assistants, sixty-five members of St. John Ambulance showed up at the hospitals and shelters, thirty-three at Camp Hill, thirteen at the Victoria General, eight at St. Paul’s Hall, four at Pine Hill, and four at Halifax Infirmary. Others were at first-aid stations.
At the Victoria General, George Murphy, the surgeon who had been hit by the skylight, carried on as best he could: “I … discovered I was bleeding pretty freely from a wound on the top of the head in the temporal parietal region, and that my hands were covered with blood…. the cut in my head was not bad…. The cut which troubled me most was in my left hand, that exposed the extensor indices tendon, and though it healed without sepsis, it made movement of that hand clumsy and painful during the days I needed it most.” Murphy left the hospital after his injuries were treated to check up on his family. But he returned and, despite the awkwardness and the pain, he carried on doing surgery.
Pressures like these were so enormous, some medical staff found it too much. At the Victoria General, the superintendent was away at a convention in the United States and the burden fell to his deputy, Charles Puttner. On Saturday, Puttner, seventy-three, collapsed from exhaustion and a heart attack. He ended up sharing a room with Murdoch Chisholm. Puttner’s role as acting superintendent presented another problem. Puttner was a pharmacist (he had patented Puttner’s emulsion of cod-liver oil), but he was also the only person at the Victoria General capable of operating the primitive X-ray equipment. The hospital had to operate without an X-ray. (That may sound worse than it was: Puttner was notorious for his faulty reading of X-rays; he had once diagnosed pajama buttons as gallstones.) There was one other X-ray machine at Dr. Mader’s private hospital and, on 10 December, Dr. E.A. Codman brought one with him and installed it at the YMCA. It was operated by W.E. Hollingum, from the naval dockyard.
Nurse Nina Coldwell, who came from Kentville by train, walked three miles through the railway yards and reached City Hall at 5 p.m. When she was assigned to a hospital, she was horrified at what she saw: “Babies and children with their eyes blown out…. Many had bled to death, artery had been cut with glass—and so many burns.” Coldwell did not eat all day, fainting three times before stopping work at 11 p.m. One reason for the pressure was so many critically injured patients. Another was that treatment was being given by volunteers with an elementary knowledge of first aid. Many wounds were severe, and almost all were filthy:
The wounds … were made with flying glass and were of all grades of severity. All the incised wounds were made by this agency, some very slight, involving the skin and superficial fascia, others going down through deep fascia and muscles to the very bone structure. Practically all were multiple. The face, head, hands and arms fared the worst. One frequently found flaps cut as regularly as if a scalpel had done them. Many of these wounds showed contusions. A dark, bruised area with many cuts scattered all over it was a common enough observation. The deep cuts showed, as a rule, much laceration. Glass was found in the muscles, fascia, bones, tendon sheathes, in fact everywhere.
The simple fractures require no special mention unless it be to say … they were not so numerous as the compound. Every compound fracture I saw was comminuted and there was much laceration of the soft tissues as well. These fractures were quite the worst I had ever seen and they all went septic and no wonder. When one finds a compound, comminuted, lacerated fracture with bits of old wall plaster, stones, laths, almost everything—driven in and among the fragments and the soft parts, he will do his best to clean up the wreck, but he is almost bound to have sepsis. In many cases, the surgeons amputated, sometimes right away, sometimes later.
The most horrifying cases involved glass, especially glass in the eyes. Nurses spent hours pulling glass from arms and legs. Physicians pulled hundreds of dagger-like splinters from victims’ faces. Time after time, there was emergency surgery to remove an eyeball. Data collected after the event showed 592 civilian survivors who were treated in hospital had eye injuries. Of these, 249 had one eye removed and sixteen had both eyes removed. All of these figures are estimates. There was so little recordkeeping that even the number of amputations is unclear. A radiologist said there were four legs and six arms amputated. Social workers put the totals at thirteen and twelve. In addition to the above, seventeen soldiers lost an eye. Of these, ten came from the Composite Battalion: Private Thomas Briggs (Chatham, NB), Private Walter Canfield (Westmoreland, PEI), Private Arthur Cleaves (LaQuille, NS), Private George Arthur Coggan (Halifax), Sergeant Charles Constable (Halifax), Private Russell Doncaster (Dartmouth), Private Joseph Mallis (no next of kin), Private Alfred Sullivan (Halifax), Private John Sullivan (Halifax), Corporal Harry Smith (Windsor, NS). There were five from the 6th Special Service Company, CEF, which was serving with the Composite Battalion: Peter Boudreau (Dalhousie, NB), Private Quintin Lantz (Halifax), Private James McPherson (Conns Mills, NS), Private Frank Thompson (no address), Frederick Waugh (Tatamagouche, NS). Those who suffered this grievous injury in other units were Gunner Charles Chappelle, 1st Regiment, Canadian Garrison Artillery (Halifax); Bandsman Wesley Latham, Princess Louise Fusiliers (Halifax). The casualty report for Private McPherson of the Composite Battalion, who had lost his right eye, noted, “Left eye severely affected. Doubtful re left eye.”
At Camp Hill, L.L. Maguire, a civilian with no medical training, helped two physicians do eye surgery. At first, the physicians tried to deaden the eye by putting cocaine on it with a spatula. When that did not work, they had Maguire put the patients under with chloroform. Maguire said the only time he felt squeamish was when one of the eyeballs missed the pail, hit the floor, and bounced back. At all of these places, including the hospitals, the response was heavily supported by supplies from army medical stores. Because Halifax was the main clearing depot for soldiers returning from overseas, it was better staffed and better supplied than most communities. The army handed out surgical instruments, drugs, dressings, and other equipment. It also shared its plentiful supply of the serums used to fight tetanus and diphtheria. Without that help, the situation would have been worse.
The shock from the explosion put some injured women into premature labour. Dr. Alexander Ross from Charlottetown recalled: “One of the most pathetic sights that I saw was that of a woman who had lost both eyes, and was also badly wounded about the head and the upper part of the body. This woman gave birth to a child the day following the explosion. Many cases of premature births have been recorded; some of them dying before assistance could arrive.” As well as trying to care for the injured, both hospitals were inundated by people trying to find missing family members. Dorothy McMurray has a vivid memory of that: “From bundle to bundle frantic people went, looking into the ashen faces of the injured and dying, seeking their own. It seems as if the whole population of the town was there, milling about, looking for missing relatives, coming to give what assistance they could.” Others matched her description: “At the beginning no one at any given hospital knew the names of the hundreds of wounded people deposited there with such suddenness. Distracted relatives often searched through five or six hospitals before discovering those whom they sought. Others, less fortunate, searched every possible or likely place only to discover in the end that the injured person had been moved to Truro or New Glasgow.” The next day, the Halifax Herald announced it was collecting the names of the injured from the various institutions and publishing them. This would be of some help.
The warning of a second explosion came at the peak of this medical activity. It was ignored by most of those treating the injured. Kelly Morton: “In mid-morning soldiers went door to door throughout the stricken city ordering all citizens to leave their homes and take to the commons, parks, and fields. Authorities believed that the naval munitions dumps were about to blow up, which would cause even more fatalities and destruction. My father sent all of us to the North Commons while he stayed behind to attend his patients and his invalid and aged mother. After a few hours, we were told it was safe to return to our home.” It was the same at the Amanda Private Hospital, which was the home of another physician, C.C. Ligoure. (Ligoure was one of the few Blacks to graduate from the School of Medicine at Queen’s University medical school before Queen’s started refusing applications from Blacks because there were no Black patients for them to treat.) Helped by a Pullman porter, H.D. Nicholas, who boarded with him, Ligoure kept treating people all day. Eventually, two nurses were sent to help and his home became a dressing station, treating 180 people each day. Ligoure and Morton were not the only physicians to carry on.
Despite the warning, those in the hospital stayed at their jobs as well. George Murphy wrote:
In the midst of this work, word came of imminent danger from another explosion, and for all to go to the parks. Not a worker in the hospital quitted his post nor did there seem to be the least perturbation anywhere although the orders were I believe, generally known throughout the hospital. I myself went to Dr. Chisholm who occupied a room on the top floor and told him of the notice sent out by the military authorities and suggested that if he attached any importance to the order, I would see that he was removed to the open and to safety. His reply was characteristic and brief, “I will stay where I am.” And he did.
So did the volunteers. Mrs. Albert Sheppard, a nurse, was leaving for the dockyard with medicine when word came of a possible second explosion. Ignoring the warning, she asked a man with a car to drive her. At first he said no, but she talked him into it and persuaded a sailor to come too. She spent the day helping the injured who came to the docks by boats. One physician did flee. He was at his office when news came that there might be a second explosion. He filled his car with patients and told his chauffeur to take them to a field near his home. Then, even though he believed the warnings, he went home and got blankets and clothes for victims who were standing around in the cold, scantily clad.
Despite the best efforts of all these people—both the volunteers and those medically trained—it was inevitable that, even at the hospitals, some injured went without help, and others were not treated as well as under normal conditions. Dr. R.A. MacIntosh said that people were lying on mattresses, shivering with the cold: “In one room, I found a woman and a baby girl about a year and a half old, soaking wet. She had been left all day without attention. The child was unconscious and died from exposure. Lives were lost from want of attention. The patients were bathed in blood, covered in black. It was impossible to get the black off. The clothes were saturated and the skin underneath was black. I saw dreadful burns and scalds caused by people falling on the stove and the stove falling on them.” One nurse, Emily Brown, commented later:
I do not suppose you want much fault finding, but I would like to have stress laid upon the education of First Aid. It seemed a pity after all these people had suffered to have anything done to add to their misery. While a great deal of the work was efficient, there was a large portion, which could be commented on, not only from the untrained, but, I suppose, doctors. So many of the wounds were sewed up without being cleaned or even the large pieces of glass removed … it seemed incredible a doctor or anyone could possibly sew up a wound without feeling or even seeing the large pieces of glass, let alone the dirt, cinders and plaster. There were also many cases of burns where dry absorbent cotton had been applied. I especially remember one boy whose face was badly burned. Dry cotton was the dressing used. The doctor and I worked off and on for hours over that child. Finally, the doctor said there as nothing to do but to take him to the operating room and etherize, and have the dressing removed.
One thing that kept the situation from getting worse was that when people saw how bad things were, they left without help or, perhaps, went looking for help elsewhere. Dr. Murphy noticed this: “Besides those who brought in stretchers, was an army of walking victims seeking some kind of first aid. Many turned away on seeing the human wreckage around them, unwilling to take the time and services of doctors and nurses from those whose needs were greater than their own.” This kind of behaviour has also been noticed after other mass-casualty incidents. However, some of the injured waited for hours and never got attention. Leo Flinn, six, and his brother, Harold, nine, went to Camp Hill and waited all day for someone to look at them. They finally left, without being treated, when their father, who was also injured, picked them up around suppertime. Leo had only a badly cut lip, but his brother eventually lost his eye. Eileen Ryan had a splinter of glass sticking out of her finger and superficial cuts. Her mother cleaned up the cuts and bathed them in rum (her son had given her a bottle as a present) without noticing Eileen had other injuries. It was not until several days later when the family was evacuated to Antigonish that a local physician took one look at her and realized she had a broken collarbone and a broken arm. By then the bones had knitted improperly. He had to re-break the collarbone to fix it properly.
Many hospitals were so badly damaged that they had problems dealing with their regular patients, let alone disaster victims. The number of beds in Halifax was far, far lower than the number of injured. For example, the Infectious Diseases Hospital in Dartmouth was so badly damaged that its few patients were evacuated. Even so, it admitted 200 victims. There was only one physician until evening when a train from New Glasgow arrived. The Nova Scotia Hospital for the mentally ill was also damaged, but it turned its recreation area into an emergency hospital. Cogswell Street Military Hospital had its windows, window casings, and outer doors blown into the wards. Parts of the ceiling collapsed. The ceiling of the operating room was destroyed. Despite that, its staff treated an estimated 500 patients—at most of the hospitals, no one was keeping count.
One hospital that did make a count was Camp Hill, and its figure is incredible. Camp Hill was a military convalescent hospital with 280 beds and no operating room. Late Thursday evening, it had 1400 critically injured patients—five patients for every bed. For several days, its staff and volunteers performed surgery using makeshift facilities. The main civilian hospital in Halifax, the Victoria General, had 250 beds, 183 in main wards and sixty-seven in a private pavilion. It also had its own power plant, an X-ray unit, a nursing school, an isolation area, and pathology. There were three operating rooms and two other private areas—one for private patients with eye problems, the other for private patients with venereal disease. The day of the explosion, it took in somewhere between 575 and 750 new patients, doubling or tripling its patient load. (The first figure shows up in a letter written by the hospital’s superintendent, the second appears in the annual report.) At Victoria General, all three operating rooms were going non-stop, but no one recorded what happened for nearly two weeks.
Perhaps the only hospital with close to adequate staffing was the Sick Children’s Hospital on Morris Street. It took in forty-four children. Since it already had twenty-two patients, the sudden intake tripled its normal patient load. However, it had eight physicians: Philip Weatherbe, P.A. McDonald, Michael Carney, Evatt Mathers, A.E. Doull, G.A. MacIntosh, Frank Mack, and Judson Graham. The best figures available suggest that the hospitals took in about 3000 victims. But there were 9000 injured. Even if several thousand people received first aid, went to physicians’ offices, or were treated at the various emergency medical centres, the services available were well short of the demand.