The Country Doctor Who Became Prime Minister

Sir Charles Tupper with his son and grandson in Ottawa in March 1891. CP Photo

Commentary

Sir Charles Tupper pulled an all-nighter on the evening of his first political meeting on Oct. 10, 1844, in his hometown of Amherst, Nova Scotia. The occasion was a debate between Joseph Howe, the famous opposition leader, reformer, and “Father of Responsible Government,” and Alexander Stewart, a senior Conservative and legislative councillor who served in the province’s venerable upper house. (Back then most provinces had their own senate.)

Politics was not the reason why Tupper stayed up all night. Rather, it was because he was a doctor—the best in town, in demand across a more than 80-kilometre radius, a distance he covered either on horseback or by horse-and-buggy—and his all-nighter was a typical house call. (A doctor in those days attended patients at their home.)

After the Stewart-Howe debate, which took place over two days, Tupper, then 23 years old, was called out “to see a man threatened with tetanus,” also known as “lockjaw,” a severe disease of the nervous system caused by bacterial infection. Dr. Tupper rode 30 kilometres on horseback to see the sick man. Taking the bedside manner quite literally, he stayed by his patient all night, returning home on horseback the next day.

Though run off his feet like most medical men in those days, Tupper was asked to write a report on the political meeting for the chief of the Tory Party, James William Johnston. Tupper wrote a long memo for Johnston, leader of the government in the legislative assembly (a kind of proto-premier in the days before 1848, when Nova Scotia became the first province to have ministers responsible to the elected assembly, i.e., responsible government). Johnston later served again as premier from 1857–1860 and 1863–1864, the eve of Confederation.

Tupper’s practice was indeed far-flung. According to his memoirs, “Recollections of Sixty Years in Canada,” on one occasion he got home at midnight, having ridden 80 kilometres from a patient’s home. Upon arrival his wife, Frances, told him he was needed urgently at Advocate Harbour, 90 kilometres away, where Colonel Armstrong was suffering from pneumonia.

Tupper told his wife that he could not go, as Miss Townshend, daughter of the Anglican Rector of Christ Church, the Rev. George Townshend, was seriously ill with scarlet fever.

But Frances Tupper had already answered by messenger that her husband would attend as soon as he got home. Tupper promised Townshend that he “would go and return without stopping.”

Tupper set out “as soon as a fresh horse was harnessed.” He saw Colonel Armstrong, prescribed medicine, and immediately got back on his wagon and “turned my face homewards.” Stopping only to eat and barely able to keep awake at the reins, he got within 30 kilometres of home when another patient at Maccan, 15 kilometres south of Amherst, needed him. Arriving at the patient’s house, Tupper asked for tea to keep him awake. But while waiting for the kettle to boil he fell asleep in a chair and could not be awakened for four hours.

On another occasion he rode out 40 kilometres to attend to a Mrs. Livingston. The case was bad, and he took with him “amputating instruments” which meant a set of saws, knives, vise-grip, and choppers to remove a limb but no modern anesthesia (pioneered in England and America in the 1840s) or modern antiseptic (pioneered by Joseph Lister in 1867, the year of Confederation).

Sir Charles Tupper in 1865. Public Domain

The woman had “osteosarcoma of the femur,” Tupper later wrote, a large cancerous growth in the upper leg. She had shrunk to a skeletal figure, was in great pain, and had not slept for six weeks. When Tupper told Mrs. Livingston that he would have to amputate at the hip and that she might die during the operation, she said she would be better off either way: “If I was sure I could not live through the operation I would beg you to take my leg off.”

He asked a new doctor in Pugwash, eight kilometres away, to assist him in the operation the following morning. Tupper also enlisted a sailor (the profession most experienced in tying knots) and showed him “how to ligature an artery.” The initial cuts being made to the flesh and arteries, the younger doctor “compressed the femoral artery” while Tupper “made the anterior flap,” which meant using part of the gluteus maximus and skin to cover the area.

The old salt seems to have stood up well, but the less experienced doctor became faint and stopped compressing the artery—a most dangerous situation which Tupper corrected by putting his own thumb on it, pushing aside and yelling at his young colleague, who came to his senses and reapplied pressure.

Tupper wrote: “I removed the limb as quickly as possible, picked up the arteries which the sailor ligatured, completed the operation, gave the patient a good dose of brandy and laudanum, after which she said she felt as if she was in heaven, and soon was asleep.”

He added that six weeks later Mrs. Livingston was able to take tea at a neighbour’s house. She “became stout” and four months later while happily weeding in her garden on a hot day, keeled over and died, Tupper says of “apoplexy.” (Today we would say it was a stroke, heart attack, or aneurysm.)

Though a talented physician, Tupper is better known for his life in politics. He was Premier of Nova Scotia from 1864–1867 and brought the province into Confederation. He later served as Prime Minister of Canada—but for only two months, May 1 to July 8, making his term the shortest in Canadian history. He lost the 1896 election despite winning the popular vote by 48 percent to 41 percent. Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberals won 117 seats to the Tories’ 86 seats. He later became the Canadian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, serving from 1883–1895.

It had been another visit by Joseph Howe in 1851 that drew Tupper into politics.

On that occasion, Tupper was asked by the organizers to drive out by horse and buggy to pick up the prominent Halifax Tory personage, Thomas Andrew Strange DeWolf, assemblyman for King’s County from 1837–1848, and bring him to Amherst to face off against Howe and a local Reform candidate, Stephen Fulton, who represented Cumberland in the assembly from 1840–1855.

Tupper introduced the Conservative. He spoke so well that the great Joseph Howe got up on stage. Tupper offered to yield the podium to the legendary assemblyman. Instead, Howe said, “Not at all, doctor; go on and make your speech.” When Tupper then urged the voters to choose DeWolf over Howe, the latter began heckling, “The candidate should be heard first.” But Howe was drowned out by Conservatives shouting, “Hear Dr. Tupper.”

The impression sank in that Howe was actually afraid of Tupper, and thus began the movement to draft him as a candidate. Tupper went on to defeat Howe in 1855 for the Cumberland seat.

Tupper rose in prominence under Johnston and made his mark by forging a new conservatism in Nova Scotia, reaching out to the Catholic minority (in the best Tory tradition) and making an alliance with Bishop Thomas Connolly of Halifax, who supported Confederation. Tupper embraced the new technology of steam locomotives, which he called “this new accompaniment of civilization—the railroad.” He supported exploiting Nova Scotia’s “inexhaustible mines” and “geographical position” to become “a vast manufacturing mart for this side of the Atlantic,” according to his biographer, Phillip Buckner.

Religion was an important factor, as Tupper, whose father, Charles, was a prominent Baptist minister and Biblical scholar, shared the Baptist tradition of the Tory leader, Johnston, though Tupper and his family became Anglicans.

It is a myth that Sir Charles was a womanizer, ribaldly known as “the ram of Cumberland.” According to Buckner, this was based “upon the flimsiest of gossip. … He certainly enjoyed the companionship of women, but there is no evidence that he was anything more than mildly flirtatious and his affection for his wife was genuine.”

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.