Service on the Skeena (Horace Wrinch, Frontier Physician)

His name was Horace Wrinch. It was 1880. He was 14 years old, a farmer’ s boy from England travelling on his own to Quebec. Twenty years later, a qualified doctor and surgeon, he arrived in Hazelton on the Skeena River in northern British Columbia as a Canadian citizen. At this time the northern interior of the province had no qualified doctors, no surgeons and no hospitals. In 1904 Horace built the first hospital in the northern interior. Over the next thirty-six years he became widely respected as a doctor and surgeon, hospital administrator, medical missionary, Methodist minister, magistrate, farmer, community leader and progressive politician. Ever innovative, he instituted a form of health insurance for the Hazelton community as early as 1908. In the 1920s, he was a two-term president of the newly established British Columbia Hospital Association and a two-term Liberal Member of the Provincial Legislature for the Skeena riding. While in the Legislature, he championed publicly funded health insurance. Upon his death in 1939, he was called “ the most influential and best liked man that ever blessed this district with his presence.” Drawn almost entirely from original and contemporaneous sources, this is the previously untold story of a remarkable British Columbian.