Rush of memories as veteran doctor returns to Nunavik

A young radio operator came to northern Quebec in the 1940s, left to become a doctor, then returned to Pangnirtung where he set up a life-saving, long-distance medical practice.

This is the true-life story of Dr. Harold Burgess, now 81, who will return to the North later this month for the first time in nearly 45 years.

Burgess will travel to Quaqtaq on Aug. 12 to attend a gathering of elders.

“I feel very honoured to think that they invited me,” Burgess said in an interview from his home in Halifax. “People say ‘have you ever gone back?’ but you can never go back, you can only go there again, because back isn’t there: those are very special years, and special friends I made there.”

Burgess, who lived in Quaqtaq during the 1940s, is bringing many photos to share with old friends and to leave with the community.

“Nujaluarik,” as Burgess was called in those days on account of his curly hair, arrived at the Cape Hope weather station at Nuvuk in 1943 to become a radio operator when he was just 19. The Cape Hope station consisted of four radio operators and a cook.

“We had a family living with us, and we were only a few miles from Quaqtaq so we had quite a bit of contact with people there,” Burgess said.

The young radio operator made many friends, including Johnny Oovaut’s father Itittuuq and George Koneak, who now lives in Kuujjuaq.

“George and I, we grew up together. I call him my brother. George learned English by trying to teach me Inuttitut. He did a much better job than I did,” said Burgess. “I was able to speak some but I must say it’s pretty rusty now.”

Quaqtaq, as Burgess remembers it, was “a very fragile community” of seven snow houses.

“It was a close-knit community – they were like one big family in a sense, and the conditions could be quite horrible or they could be fairly good.”

Inuit were completely dependent on hunting for their survival.

“When they were healthy it was all right, but occasionally there would be some sort of sickness and that was a very stressful thing for such a small community.”

One of his outstanding memories is of a month-long trip he took by dog team up the coast to Salluit with the Catholic missionary André Steinmann, who was known as Umikallak on account of his beard, and Inuit friends.

“It was a wonderful trip. Most of the time we spent in our little igloos that we built for our nights,” he said.

Burgess left Quaqtaq to work on Resolution Island, and then returned, finally leaving Quaqtaq in 1948 for good.

But, inspired by his years in the North, he headed back to school to study medicine, became a doctor and took up the fight against tuberculosis.

Burgess spent the winter of 1956 and 1957 attending to Inuit patients in the TB sanatorium in Hamilton, Ont.

“We had one of the biggest single Inuit populations right there because they had been evacuated to that sanatorium.”

In 1975, Burgess took many of these recovered patients back north when he, along with his new wife, Jean, went to Pangnirtung to work at the St. Luke’s Hospital.

There, Burgess became a long-distance doctor to people all over the Baffin region and northern Quebec.

“I set up my own radio station in Pang and I was in touch with almost everything east of Hudson’s Bay, basically every night,” Burgess said.

He received radio consultations from far-flung trading posts, missions and nursing stations, where traders, priests and nurses sought his advice on how to deal with the ill.

One summer, Burgess set out on the C.D. Howe, as its chief medical officer, dropping off medical kits to communities so they would have the supplies they needed in emergencies. This made his radio consultations a lot easier.

“I knew pretty well what was there. I had designed these kits, so that was a help.”

While in Pangnirtung, Burgess also made strong ties with local Inuit, working, among many others, with Etuangat and Henry Boasie.

“They were wonderful people, absolutely wonderful,” Burgess said.

During the winter, he traveled around with the RCMP by air, visiting smaller camps throughout the Baffin region.

Conditions during those years were hard. As a doctor, Burgess found the people who lived in the camps that were closest to medical care, such as in Pangnirtung, were not very healthy or prosperous.

“The further away you got, the better they were, the healthier they were, and the more prosperous they were, as a rule. The people who were not very well moved in, where they got some medical attention, but when you got far away enough from this kind of contact, they were either quite healthy or they were dead,” he said.

Burgess is modest about his contributions to health care in the North.

“We all worked hard hoping that we could set the stage up for the kind of development that has happened since. We used to tell the Inuit they were a great people, and had a lot of potential, and they were going places.”