Mary Percy Jackson

Dr. Mary Percy Jackson, OC, AOE (27 December 1904 – 6 May 2000) was an English medical practitioner in the Canadian province of Alberta based in Keg River and the Peace River Country for 45 years.

Mary Percy Jackson was the eldest of four children.

Her father, Thomas Arthur Percy, was a wool merchant and tailor in Dudley, England.

Many of her family, including her mother Amy Jane Percy (née Chilton), were school teachers.

Despite the family tradition of teaching, at the age of eleven she decided she wanted to be a medical doctor.

No-one, including Mary herself, knows why she made this choice; her father suggested that she would have made an excellent lawyer because she argued so much.

However, in 1915 women were not allowed to be lawyers.

She graduated from the University of Birmingham in 1927 with degrees in surgery and medicine.

She took the Queen's Prize for achieving the highest marks in her class.

Over the next two years she served as a house physician at Birmingham General Hospital, casualty house physician in the children's hospital, and house surgeon in the maternity hospital.

She wanted to work in obstetrics in Calcutta, India, a post that only came up every third year.

As she graduated in "the wrong year", she had to find other work to fill in the time until she would be able to apply for the Calcutta job.

A colleague drew her attention to a job advertisement in the British Medical Journal, seeking a female doctor to serve in Alberta, Canada:

"23 February 1929. Strong energetic Medical Women with post-graduate experience in Midwifery, wanted for country work in Western Canada, under the Provincial Government Department of Health. Apply in first instance to Dr. E.M. Johnstone, c/o Fellowship of the Maple Leaf, 13, Victoria Street, London, SW1."

In reply to her request for further information from Dr. Emma Johnstone, OBE, the reply added that "The ability to ride a saddle horse would be a great advantage".

Jackson had previously taken up horse riding at Sutton Coldfield Riding School in a desire for more exercise, although her family said she rarely, if ever, left the indoor arena.

When she learned that Alberta had the Rocky Mountains, she was keen to go, not realising how far north she was to be stationed, or the distance to the Rockies.

She originally intended her stay in Alberta to be a one-year adventure.

The Fellowship of the Maple Leaf organisation were to pay her passage.

She travelled to stay with and meet the organisation's founder Canon P. J. Andrews and his wife, also meeting their friend Dr. Johnstone, with whom Mary had had her earlier correspondence.

Johnstone gave her the advice "Whatever you do, go to the Dental Hospital a get yourself a week's practice pulling teeth!"

She travelled to Southampton and boarded the RMS Empress of Scotland for a week-long voyage to Québec City, passing around Cape Race on 13 July 1929.

A further week-long railway journey took her westwards past Ottawa and Lake Superior across the expanse of Canada from dense forest to open prairie.

Her companions for the sea voyage—also funded by the Fellowship of the Maple Leaf—were Dr. Helen O'Brien, who would serve in Lac La Biche, and Dr. Elizabeth Rodger, who was heading to work at Lesser Slave Lake northwest of Edmonton.

Arriving at the end of a three-month drought in Central Alberta, on 21 July 1929 she was introduced to her job by the Minister of Health, the Honourable George Hoadley, at a meeting in Edmonton.

Following this meeting she spent a week with the Travelling Clinic, reaching some 50 mi north further north to Clyde.

Her journey concluded by train 300 miles (480 km) from Edmonton, north to Peace River Town and along the Peace River aboard D.A Thomas accompanied by Kate Brighty, the Superintendent of Public Health Nursing.

Jackson was based in Battle River Prairie.

The nearest medical aid was 120 km away in Peace River, connected to her territory by a dirt road which was impassable in bad weather.

In these early days there were eight deliveries of post a year—one delivery per month for the summer months when the river was not frozen.

There were no roads, no electricity, no telegraph lines and no services.

She was given a remote log shack in the middle of the 400 sqmi area she was to serve.

The property was dirty when she arrived, there were no shelves, and the only place for a patient to lie down was her own bed.

She was from a family which had a maid, so she was not used to cooking, nor to such harsh circumstances as she found in Canada on her arrival.

She had grown up during the First World War, when food was in short supply, with not enough available for girls to have cookery lessons with at school.

Cooking at her new home was not easy and happened on a wood-burning stove that needed almost continual stoking to prevent the flames from going out; for quite a time, she relied heavily on her Primus stove.

She bought a rifle in 1929 so she could hunt prairie chickens and even moose to supplement her diet.

Despite the hardships, she wrote to her parents a few weeks after her arrival "I wouldn’t come back to England for a 1000 dollars just now! I know I’m doing the right job."

The newly arrived doctor began her practice immediately.

She traveled by horseback and occasionally by dogsled or cutter.