Panic In Ploughman’s Cove

“Typhoid”, the word was said almost in a whisper, even by the seasoned nurse, as she shut the bedroom door where thirteen year old Elias Gillingham lay delirious with a raging fever. Mavis Olsen R.N. or Nurse Olsen, as she was known to the people of Newfoundland’s South East coast, quickly took charge.  All residents of the house were placed under instant  quarantine and the skipper of the small boat that had brought her to the cove, sent with an urgent message to the nearest telegraph office. The message to health authorities in St. John’s was straight and to the point. A case of typhoid had been diagnosed in Ploughman’s Cove with the patient needing immediate hospitalization, it also asked that a doctor be sent at once to the small remote community as all residents would need to be inoculated. The news spread through the community like wildfire with everyone wondering about the source of the disease and parents fearing for the lives of their children. The drinking water used by the Gillinghams came from the same source as that utilised by four other families in the area and so it was felt, could be ruled out as the cause, since none else had contracted the disease. As most children of ten years or older often wandered for miles during the long summer days, it was thought most likely that Elias had taken a drink from  some stagnant pool of water. The question was, had other children done the same? Later that evening, a boat carrying Elias and the nurse left for the two hour trip to Pleasantville. There they would be met by an ambulance with a nurse from the Fever  Hospital in St. John’s.

Nurse Olsen had come  to Newfoundland in 1909 as Mavis Anderson having completed her nurses training in London, England. She had read about conditions in rural Newfoundland, and of the many women who died in childbirth having no nurse or even trained midwives. She decided to volunteer and wrote Sir Ralph Champneys Williams, the governor of the day. Six months later, she arrived in St. John’s and two weeks after that had set up her headquarters at Carefree Harbour, where she would be responsible for more then thirty communities stretched over  approximately  one hundred miles of rugged coastline. Six years later she married Chesley Olson, Son of the Rev. and Mrs Charles Olson, the Anglican Priest who was also stationed at Carefree Harbour.  It was now 1949, forty years since she had come to the island, yet she was as busy as ever never dreaming of retirement. Her thoughts now were of the Gillingham family and others in Ploughman’s Cove, and whether the disease had spread. Upon turning over her charge to the ambulance at Pleasantville, She returned at once to make preparations for the doctor’s arrival. A temporary lab was set up at the empty one room school and everyone instructed to send for her at once if anyone developed a fever. She checked again with the Gillingham family and arranged for provisions to be delivered to them while under quarantine.