WILSON, FRANK GORDON (1898-1963)

WILSON, FRANK GORDON, doctor; b. Sydney, N.S, 21 Oct 1898, s/o Charles F. M. Wilson and Ella Munro; m. 1927, Irene Sutherland, d/o Murdoch Sutherland and Edith J. Blackmore; d. Red Bank, 17 Apr 1963.

Frank G. Wilson attended school in Sydney, N.S., and was trained in medicine at Dalhousie University (MD CM 1923). After accumulating approximately two years of professional experience in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland he established a general practice at Red Bank in 1925. He was the only doctor ever to spend a lifetime there, but Dr Charles E. Coleman, a native of Chatham, practiced at Red Bank between 1903 and 1910; Dr Hugh W. Schwartz in 1913; and Dr Malcolm Beaton, a brother of Dr John Beaton, from 1913 or 1914 to 1917.

Wilson had "an unostentatious but honorable" medical career, from 1923 until he was sidelined by illness in 1962. He was a skilled surgeon and was "untiring" in his attentions to his patients. For many years he made home visits up and down the Northwest and Little Southwest branches of the Miramichi, travelling in winter by horse and sleigh.

Wilson was "a modest type of man," whose principal recreations were salmon fishing and bird hunting. He and his wife, Irene Sutherland, were adherents of St Stephen's United Church at Red Bank. They had four children who survived to adulthood, two of whom also entered the field of medicine, their daughter Rolla Wilson being an anesthesiologist at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, and their son Jerome S. Wilson an award-winning physician in Newcastle.