Adversity Vanquished: Memoirs of a McGill Medical Student, Harold W. Trott, 1918–1924

The author examines the first half of the 1944 autobiography of Harold Trott (1899-1961), titled Campus Shadows, which describes his life as a medical student at McGill University between 1918 and 1924. It is one of the most detailed memoirs by a McGill student for any period. Trott wrote about his lectures, dissecting labs, clinics, bull sessions, money problems, professors, classmates, rowdy student initiations, and life at McGill's Strathcona Hall residence and in Montreal rooming houses. His account is augmented and verified by background from student publications and the McGill University Archives. In his first year at McGill, Trott faced poverty, despair, and a paralyzing disease, the Landry-Guillain-Barré-Strohl Syndrome, which he described strikingly from the patient's viewpoint and which he survived with the help of Dr. Colin Russel and the staff of Montreal's Royal Victoria Hospital. Trott described his long, painful recovery, including two interim years at University of Western Ontario, his final two years at McGill, and how he used the lessons from his medical training in his later medical practice, advocating natural remedies such as drinking water rather than drugs and pills. Practicing in New York State, he sympathized mildly with the idea of state-funded medical care, which was then being advocated in his native Canada.

Fontanus

Vol. 12

11-40

2010

en