DR. MACLEAN DOES DENTISTRY

By Jim MacNeill

Dr. MacLean, graduate of the University of Toronto was the chief and only medical practioner in the 1880's in Lang, village in what was to become Saskatchewan. Although a medical doctor, he was pressed into duty as a dentist because there was no dentist in Lang. His total equipment? A tooth extractor.

He says in a memoir, “Even to this day I am ashamed of my dentistry endeavours.

On one occasion, the village baker, a big man came to the office and while he was waiting, he heard a patient make an outcry with pain, who, when he came out, was holding his jaw after an extraction. I called the baker in. He then told me that he had been up half the night with a toothache. He said, `You will hardly believe it, Doctor, but since I came here the pain is all gone, and I think I will wait until I have another attack,’ and he walked out. I thought it was a fine way of curing a toothache.

Dr. MacLean left Lang to do post graduate work in Chicago in 1912. He and his wife returned and set up a practice in Regina, but left again in 1938, the height of the Depression, for Los Angeles. Dr. Hugh MacLean died in 1958 at the age of 80.

"Jim's Snapshot" is updated each Monday with a fresh, provocative and stimulating insight from local writer and visionary, Jim MacNeill.