A Cyclopaedia of Canadian Biography: Being Chiefly Men of the Time: A Collection of Persons Distinguished in Professional and Political Life, Leaders in the Commerce and Industry of Canada, and Successful Pioneers
History
A Cyclopaedia of Canadian Biography: Being Chiefly Men of the Time: A Collection of Persons Distinguished in Professional and Political Life, Leaders in the Commerce and Industry of Canada, and Successful Pioneers
from business, since which time he has been living on his income, with
his wife and unmarried daughter in a commodious dwelling, enjoying that
repose and comfort which is the just reward of honest industry.
* * * * *
=Waddell, John=, M.D. The late Dr. Waddell, of St. John, New Brunswick,
was the son of the Rev. John Waddell, a native of Shotts, Scotland. The
latter was educated at Glasgow, and came to Nova Scotia in 1797, and
became pastor of the Presbyterian church of Truro. He was married in
1802 to a daughter of Jotham Blanchard (a loyalist from Massachusetts,
and a colonel in one of the loyalist regiments). The Rev. Mr. Waddell
officiated on the occasion of the opening of the old St. Andrew’s Kirk,
in St. John, N.B. (destroyed by the great fire), having delivered the
first sermon in the church in which his son, the subject of this sketch,
fifty years afterwards became a prominent and influential elder. Dr.
Waddell was born in Truro, Nova Scotia, on the 17th of March, 1810. When
quite a boy, his mother died. After attending the Grammar school at
Truro, kept by Mr. James Irving, he entered the Pictou Academy, under
the presidency of Dr. McCulloch (the able Biblical controversialist,
whose discussions with Bishop Burke, of Halifax, made his name famous
throughout Nova Scotia). After leaving the academy, he went into
mercantile business in his native town, and so continued until the
autumn of 1833, when he commenced the study of medicine under Dr. Lynds.
He next proceeded to Glasgow, Scotland, where he pursued his studies
with untiring assiduity, and received his diploma, October 18th, 1839,
from the Royal College of Surgeons, London. He then went to Paris, and
continued there two years, attending the medical lectures given by some
of the most scientific men of the French capital. On his return to Nova
Scotia, in 1840, he commenced the practice of medicine in Truro. The
same year he married Susan, the only daughter of his first medical
teacher, Dr. Lynds. The following year she died. Five years afterwards
he married Jane Walker Blanchard, daughter of Edward Blanchard, of
Truro. In 1849, Dr. Waddell was appointed by His Excellency, Sir Edmund
Head, to the situation of medical superintendent of the New Brunswick
Lunatic Asylum, a position whose arduous and multifarious duties he
discharged with signal success, until his retirement in the spring of
1876, a period of twenty-seven years. When he took charge of the asylum,
at the age of thirty-nine, he was the very personification of vigorous
health. He was tall and finely proportioned. Humanly speaking there was
in him the promise of the attainment of a life of four score years and
more. He sprang from a long-lived race. His step was elastic and his
form erect; his mind was buoyant and full of love for the work he had
but just undertaken. By his kind and gentlemanly manner, he was
singularly capable of dealing with those unfortunates who required so
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