Is there a doctor in the house?

Dr. Macintosh, Georgetown, Ontario, 1955-1964, and beyond

“Nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.” – Milan Kundera
“Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days.” – Doug Larson

When our family moved to Georgetown from Toronto in 1955, my baby sister had just barely survived a near-terminal bout of whooping cough, so my parents were naturally shaken and in immediate need of a family doctor.

The town was tiny; the consensus was clear. Dr. Alistair Macintosh was the physician to seek.

So began nine years of Dr. Mac administering remedies at our home, as well as at his downtown office.

It’s the house calls that I remember. Would you believe that we once had a family doctor who provided routine domiciliary ministrations?

Dr. Mac would bustle into our humble abode on Elizabeth Street, armed with his trusty, somewhat battered black bag brimming with weapons of mass germ detection and destruction, and would begin wielding his renowned stethoscope.

My father was delighted to welcome a fellow Scot to our house, where Dad could put on his false Caledonian accent and seize the opportunity to bellow “Hoots man” and “Och Aye, the noo.”

13 things you should never say to a person from Scotland

My sister and I were often sick, yet we were far from sickly. In those days, little kids just ”came down with things.”

Dr. Mac treated us for mumps; measles (both red and German); chicken pox; fevers and flu.

He was a mere phone call away.

I don’t remember being too upset about being ill.

I got to miss school (a definite plus!) and to read or loll about in bed and sometimes to clamber into the living room, wrapped in a blanket, to watch inane cartoons and daytime television shows, mostly beamed from Buffalo, New York.

A big plus was the ginger ale. I don’t know if this otherwise forbidden soft drink was recommended for feverish bairns by Dr. Mac, but I do recall that my mother waived her no-sweet-drink rule when we were “running a temperature.”

(My mom’s alimentary strictures were most extremely arbitrary: she and my sister would wolf all manner of potato chips coated in colours never found in nature and heaps of Chelsea buns and Hot Cross buns – in season of course – while watching Ed Sullivan and Perry Mason, but she normally drew a line in the sand when it came to “pop.”)

Now it’s true that there were moments of dread with the arrival of Dr. Mac, especially when suppositories were the order of the day. This remedy seemed to be administered rather frequently back in the 1950s and 1960s, and I can still recall the quivering anticipation and nasty, slithering sensation that accompanied this intrusion up the old wazoo.

(Prostate examinations still cause these Dr. Mac moments to rush back to consciousness like a sinister bullet from the bowels of time.)

But leaving such invasions of the nether realm aside, a visit from gentle Dr. Mac was a balm rather than a perturbation.

P.S. It’s easy and tempting to yield to nostalgia, a yearning for the “good old days” that can engender distortions of the truth, but in the case of health care I can’t help but pine for my childhood days.

My wife and I moved to Ottawa from France less than a year ago and quickly learned that family doctors were as rare as hen’s teeth, with 250,000 or more supplicants forming an interminable line in search of that one elusive GP.

I’ve written about our sometimes hilarious pursuit of a sawbones here:

I can’t get no…family doctor – Robert McBryde

And here:

Strip Mall Medicine in Ottawa, Ontario, Part Two: The Plot Thickens – Robert McBryde

Oh I so mourn the dear, long-departed Dr. Mac!

Read about Dr. Mac here:

Dr. MacIntosh – THE GEORGETOWN VAULT

And here:

Alistair Macintosh Obituary (2006) – The Globe and Mail

Your friend,
Robert
Robert McBryde – robertmcbrydeauthor.com