Bandsman Lyman Nichols, eventually called upon for more than his musical skills in the Great War.

It was nearly the last question I fielded the other night. I’d just told the story of Uxbridge youth Lyman Nichols – how (underage) he had joined Sam Sharpe’s 116th Ontario County Battalion in 1915, but when he turned 18 how, as a bandsman, he joined the 116th officially and marched off to the Great War, how he survived the battles at Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele, and how he’d come home wounded among 160 surviving soldiers (of the regiment’s original 1,600).

“What had helped the Canadians get through?” someone at my Vimy dinner audience in Peterborough asked.

“They were task-oriented,” I suggested. “Perhaps more than all the regular soldiers from Britain and the Empire, the Canadians before the war had been farmers, lumberjacks, fisherman, labourers, even students who all understood the meaning of getting a job done.”

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In his 2009 book “Tainted,” Canadian author Ross Pennie explores the hypothetical likelihood of a regional health facility facing a sudden outbreak of mad-cow disease in a small Ontario community without any apparent explanation. The book is a thriller, an entirely fictionalized depiction of a system facing a medical crisis and widespread public panic right in our own backyard.

But Dr. Pennie admitted to me – and the audience watching our interview at the Whitby Pubic Library, Monday night – that he didn’t write this medical mystery as a slam against doctors or Canadian health facilities. No, he said, it was, in a way, medical teaching universities he was decrying.

“I’m not criticizing doctors or the medical system,” he said, “but I am knocking those in academe who would rather drag each other down than see any one individual scientist get credit for advancing the cause of medicine.”

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Ted Barris

author | journalist

Posts with the McMaster University tag

Vimy and the value of work

More lethal than disease