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Extreme nursing
Tempting Providence
A play by Robert Chafe
Directed by Jillian Keiley
Original lighting design by Walter J. Snow
Costume design by Barry Buckle
A Theatre Newfoundland Labrador Production
National Arts Centre Studio, July 15-31, 2004
As the story goes, Daniel's Harbour was a lucky find. A natural cove on the western shore of Newfoundland's Great Northern Peninsula, it gave lifesaving refuge to one Daniel Riggins (or Regan) and his family on a stormy day in 1821 when they were travelling from Labrador to Bonne Bay. Another kind of providence took 31-year-old Myra Grimsley, of London, England, to Daniel's Harbour exactly 100 years later. After ten years in practice as a nurse in Britain - a more comfortable setting, but one emotionally shattered by the Great War - she'd been persuaded by the wife of the Governor of Newfoundland to bring her skills to a place in dire need of nurses. She accepted a 2-year contract at $900 a year in Daniel's Harbour, an isolated community connected to the world (weather depending) by dogsled, horse and coastal steamer. The nearest hospital was the Grenfell Mission, hundreds of miles away. The need was plain, her duty clear. Nurse Grimsley became dentist, bonesetter, midwife and guardian of public health. Within a year she also became the wife of Angus Bennett, a local ex-merchant marine; and so it was that two years spun into nearly seventy. She died in her adopted home, a centenarian.
Before her official retirement in 1953, Myra Bennett had delivered hundreds of babies and extracted thousands of teeth. Her most storied achievement was to reattach her brother-in-law's nearly-severed foot after he fell on the blade of a lumber saw. This "Florence Nightingale of the North" also practised the rational empiricism needed in public...