What this blog is about...

Back in 1988, I borrowed a book from my mother called Saddlebag Surgeon: The Story of Dr. Murrough O’Brien and decided to read for myself the chapter which supposedly has a distant family member crossing paths with Jack the Ripper in 1888.

The backstory to the story, so to speak, was that my grandmother had been browsing a used bookstore in Victoria, B.C. years ago and came across this pocketbook on a sidewalk display. She flipped it over to read the summary and began to recognize names, locations...even time periods. It was as if she were reading about her own life. So she picked the book up and it eventually got passed around to the extended family until my own mother ended up with it in the mid-80s.

To my surprise, the book was an easy read...and funny. Sure, the doctor’s life was filled with excitement and drama but Robert Tyre managed to rein in the extended memories and edit them down to be palatable, even for short attention spans.

The book’s connection to my family — at least according to my grandmother — is that Murrough O’Brien met and married Margaret Barber (highlighted below) from Dominion City, Manitoba shortly after he set up his first medical practice in that frontier town. My grandmother’s great aunt married one of Margaret’s brothers (highlighted below) which would have made O’Brien a great uncle-in-law to my grandmother. I think.

Whatever the case, it was the Barber clan from Dominion City that both he and my grandmother’s aunt married into in the latter years of the 19th century. With Margaret at his side, he set out across the uncouth Canadian prairies and devoted his medical expertise to the well-being of the citizens of his newly adopted country. It is his 60-year career as a country doctor that forms the backdrop to many amazing and seemingly unbelievable tales he candidly shares with Tyre, a reporter with the Regina Leader-Post at the time.

There is a chapter in Saddlebag Surgeon that describes a close encounter with Jack the Ripper, but it doesn’t involve my relative, as I was led to believe. It occurred when Murrough, then a medical student at St. Mary’s Medical School in 1888, was on “stork patrol” early one morning and got summoned to help deliver a baby in the White Chapel area of London.

As he told Tyre, the woman who initially knocked on his dorm room door and lead him to the scene of the problem labour ended up as the fifth victim of Jack the Ripper. When he emerged from the flat, he recalls footsteps running towards him immediately after a woman’s scream pierced the night, but the footsteps veer off in another direction and away from the doctor. He further claims that if he had been delayed even a few seconds from leaving the flat, he might have been the only living person to have crossed paths with the Ripper.

As much as my 21-year-old mind bought into the drama of this historical moment as I read the book in 1988, I eventually explored the likelihood of this chance encounter years later as I’ll explain in a future blog.

For now, though, this was the tale from the book that got the lion’s share of attention from my family. In my mind, I felt it was a small part of Murrough O’Brien’s story and that his life — going from an Irish royal pedigree to penniless in Canada to medical practitioner — was worth telling again...to a new generation of Canadians. So I set out on a journey to learn more about Dr. Murrough O’Brien with the intention of adapting Saddlebag Surgeon for the big screen.

More than 20 years later, I am still pursuing this idea, albeit with greater and greater difficulty but no less interest, as you’ll read in this blog.