Grenfell, Wilfred Thomason, Sir, 1865-1940

English medical missionary.

Sir Wilfred Thomason Grenfell was a medical missionary to Newfoundland and Labrador. Horace Parker Chandler was a real estate broker, journalist, editor, and publisher, of Boston, Mass.

Epithet: author and medical missionary in Labrador

Wilfred Grenfell was a medical missionary to Newfoundland and Labrador from 1892-1940. He was an author and a member of Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen. Grenfell established the Labrador Medical Mission and the International Grenfell Association.

Grenfell was born in Parkgate, Cheshire, England in 1865. He was educated at Oxford University, the University of London, and London Hospital. In 1884 he entered the medical service of the Royal National Missionary to Deep Sea Fishermen as a surgeon. In 1892 he began 40 years of service to the Eskimos, Indians, and fishermen of Labrador, raising money by writing books and giving lectures. In 1912 he founded the International Grenfell Association. Largely because of his efforts to improve living conditions in Labrador, hospitals, hospital ships, nursing stations, orphanages, schools, and industrial centers were established in the area. He died in Charlotte, Vt. in 1940.

Wilfred Thomason Grenfell was born in Cheshire in 1865, he studied at Marlborough and Queens College Oxford. In 1892 he visited Labrador and set up a hospital there in 1893. He died in 1940

Ten of the books are written by or about Wilfred Thomason Grenfell, MD, (1865-1940) who retired to Charlotte, Vermont, in 1932, after spending 40 years working in Northern Newfoundland and the coast of Labrador. An English doctor and knighted by King George V, Sir Grenfell was a medical missionary who established hospitals, schools, an orphanage, and co-operatives, improving the health care, education, and economic standards of many of the coastal inhabitants. The books focus on his life and his observations of the difficult living conditions that he worked to improve from 1892 to 1932. In 1931, Dr. Grenfell and his wife, Lady Anne Grenfell, opened the well known Dog Team Tavern, in Middlebury, Vt., as a tea house and shop. Their goal was to establish another source to benefit the people of Labrador and Newfoundland by selling their handicrafts. The not-for-profit, registered Canadian Charity, Grenfell Historic Properties, St. Anthony, Newfoundland and Labrador, continues the mission effort today.

The collection also includes an autobiography, entitled Arctic Doctor, by Dr. Joseph P. Moody, a "physician, explorer and photographer," who spent from 1946-1949 and 1950-1954 as a medical officer for the Canadian Department of Health and Welfare in the Canadian East Arctic. He and his wife and young daughter lived at their home base in Chesterfield on the Chesterfield Inlet, Nunavut, Canada, the west coast of Hudson Bay. He describes their experiences in the arctic with the Inuit.

Sir Wilfred Thomason Grenfell (1865-1940) was an English physician, author, and missionary who promoted child welfare work and built several hospitals and orphanages in Labrador and Newfoundland, Canada.

Wilfred Thomason Grenfell was born on February 28, 1865 in Parkgate, England. He attended London Hospital Medical School in 1883. While in London Grenfell decided to join the Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fisherman. The organization sent him to Newfoundland in 1892. While there, Grenfell built several hospitals and established both schools and orphanages for the children of the region. On a return trip from England, Grenfell met Anne Elizabeth Caldwell MacClanahan and the couple wed on November 18, 1909. Together they had three children, Wilfred Thomason, Jr., Kinloch Pascoe, and Rosamond Loveday. Grenfell was made a Knight Commander of St. Michael and St. George in 1928. He died in Vermont on October 9, 1940.