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GARFIELD WRIGHT Chairman and Members York County Hospital Board Ladies and Gentlemen The Council of The Regional Municipality of York is pleased to offer congratulations to the York County Hospital Board on the occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the York County Hospital The service provided by the Hospital is exemplary and is offered not only to the citizens of York Region but also to the citizens of many of our neighbouring municipalities As our populations increase the need for hospital services also increases The former County of York played a major role in financing previous expansion programmes of the York County Hospital and the new Regional Municipality of York has committed itself to follow this tradition in the future planned building expansion Best wishes are extended to members of the Board the hospital staff and the medical profession in the continuing operation of this excellent public facility Doctor recalls early days Wouldnt you think a town that let hockey players bunk down in the hospital and had nothing but mud just west of its main drag would smarten up after awhile Well it did The only mud around Newmarket today is called potting soil and is sold by the bag And if there is a hockey player in the York County Hospital he is either sick or injured not bushed from two periods of overtime Which goes to show how much can be made to happen in 40odd years if your and you put But when Gordon Cock showed up on the frosty afternoon of February more or less fresh out of medical school the Memorial Cup playoffs were about to begin and before long visiting players were quartered in a fivebed ward on the hospitals second floor called the wartime service in Europe as a Division medical officer He is a whitehaired bluff gregarious man who claims lo be on In the early and when Newmarkets population hovered around its hospital had beds There was an xray machine but it was wholly owned by a less than obliging and aging doctor He was a cantankerous old fellow and you could never push him says Cock Whats more you could never tell when he was going to be there The old doctor employed a girl to take xrays of patients brought in by other physicians which was a good thing because none of them knew how to operate it But the owner of the machine was the only one who could develop and read the film a task he did only when the spirit moved him There was no staff organization at the hospital at all says Gordon Cock Anybody who wanted to put a patient in there just did and he treated the patient as he saw fit Blood transfusions were un common Bui when one was needed donors were practically buttonholed first had needle and then boil it to avoid in fecting his patient with something Depression lay heavily on the land Wages were about to for a s day week if there had been a six- day week to work Ninety families were on total relief says Cock and scores more subsisted on partial relief Under the village welfare program a doctor was paid on paper at any rate 50 cents a month for looking after a welfare patient and all welfare patients required medical care says Cock partly because of dietary deficiencies We had no antibiotics in those days and that meant you had to see a patient with pneumonia maybe twice a day for a week or more A welfare maternity case carried a fixed fee of again on paper When a doctor submitted his bill to the welfare office for a months work any more than three items were crossed off Cock says He never got percent of the he grossed of that had to pay a month rent Patients paid me in vegetables the odd piece of beef or I might get a tire for the car from another he says There was one farmer who showed up one day with a handful of radishes and asked me to take them off his bill When I went overseas he owed me 1500 When Gordon Cock settled in Newmarket there was almost nothing east of the present hospital site on Davis Drive then known as Huron Street To the west of Main Street the village quickly petered out into the farmlands along Street The bush began a halfmile from Main Street and the road to Orangeville wasnt much more than a dirt track In fact the roads were so bad in winter says Cock that he often made better time by taking to the frozen fields in his car When a Newmarket physician Cock was the fifth when he arrived in headed out of town to deliver a baby on a farm he Patients the odd