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york county hospital page 15 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 youre a town and you put your mind to it but when gordon cock showed up on the frosty afternoon of february 1 1933 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 sunroom it now is the board room it shows how busy the place was says gordon cock at 65 he has been mending ills and delivering babies in the newmarket area for nearly 40 years except for wartime service in europe as a 5th division medical officer he is a whitehaired bluff gregarious man who claims to be on the threshhold of semiretirement from practice yet while he chatted and chuckled and reminisced aloud the phone in the office he keeps in his botsford street home rang repeatedly in the early and mid30s when newmarkets population hovered around 3800 its hospital had 25 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 he patient as he saw fit blood transfusions were un common but when one was needed donors were practically buttonholed on the street if no immediate relative was available blood typing was an infant science the doctor who proposed to administer the serum first had to rummage around for a needle and then boil it to avoid in fecting his patient with something worse than he already had the paralyzing misery of the depression lay heavily on the land and newmarkets few factories worked only two to three days a week wages were about 12 to 15 for a six- 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 3 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 more than 122 percent of the ac counts he submitted the first year of his practice in newmarket he grossed 1000 and out of that had to pay 50 a month rent patients paid me in vegetables the odd piece of beef or i mighl 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 yonge 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 1933 headed out of town to deliver a baby on a farm he had to count on being gone for a full day and perhaps longer york county hospital meanwhile was charging 5 a day for a private room and 3 for a bed in a ward but the hospital never collected their bills either and i dont know how they made out he says it always seemed people sympathetic citizens managed to kick through with something when it was most needed the hospital despite the fact that it had only 25 beds was never full and it never closed its doors doctors could take patients in and put them to bed whenever they wanted to and the only requirement was that they possessed a medical degree but you couldnt really go on forever like that because a hospital has to have some remote idea of how many patients its serving cock says you have got to have some kind of control over whats going on inside the place the newmarket doctors did ap pendectomies gall bladder removal and other minor to mediumrisk surgery but the major cases were referred to specialists in toronto who sometimes drove to newmarket and performed operations there we were a little diffident about turning gall bladders and other relatively minor cases over to an outside doctor because wed never see the patient again cock chuckles after all he says if we sent a patient to a toronto doctor for a gall bladder removal the fellow would be bound to say to himself well if this man can handle the gall bladder he can handle the rest of it too cock once was summoned to a farmhouse where he was told by an anguished relative on the phone the farmer had died when the physician got there he found the farmer stretched out on a living room sofa apparently peaceful in death and the distraught family indulging its grief in the backyard cock examined the patient got neither pulse nor heartbeat thrust his head out the back door to murmur his condolences and returned to the parlor where it occurred to him that he had never tried to locate a heart with a hypodermic needle he dug a syringe out of his bag and stuck the unsterilized needle into the victims chest he pulled the plunger slowly saw the syringe begin to fill with dark red blood and concluded that he had been successful cock went to the kitchen washed off the needle in the sink and returned to the parlor to pack up then he heard a noise and there was nobody in that room except him and me suddenly excited he started pumping the farmers chest up and down the man began to breathe the farmer regained consciousness shortly afterward and went on to recover completely he suffered no apparent brain damage from the lack of oxygen although says cock it was at least 10 minutes and perhaps longer from the time i got the call until i started working on him nobody would believe that story but it happened today years later gordon cock says i dont like the drama in medicine any more why part of it is my own ignorance as a doctor things have become so sophisticated and in this day and age when they can sue you for everything you do its perhaps just as well to turn the job over to someone else again he says there is so much politics in medicine now he dislikes working within medicare i think theyve got us by the throat although he concedes readily that it has benefitted the public with that view of the present memories of the past are all the more important to gordon cock the warmest ones obstetrics is the most satisfying thing in medicine he says there is nothing more satisfying than seeing a happy mother with a new baby and gordon cock ought to know he has delivered more than 40 grand children of the babies he delivered when he first came to newmarket patients paid me in vegetables the odd oiece of beef or a tire ii