Working Vacations and Adventure: American Women Physician Volunteers to the Labrador Mission of Wilfred Grenfell Before 1914

Many accounts, autobiographical and scholarly, emphasize how volunteers portrayed their work in the mission established for fishers by British physician Wilfred Grenfell in Newfoundland and Labrador: as escapist adventure. Scholars have not studied women physicians or their motivations to volunteer, however. This oversight derives from their small number combined with lack of knowledge about this mission's distinction from the foreign medical missions and domestic frontier missions that drew many women physicians to permanent positions. This study therefore discusses two American physicians, Alfreda B. Withington (1860-1951) and Emma E. Musson (1862-1913), who volunteered for summer service with this mission in 1907 and 1909, respectively. Through their publications, biographical sources, and clinical accounts, it reveals the appeal to them of such temporary, accessible volunteer service as a working vacation that rejuvenated. Importantly, it counters the skewed perspective of contemporary accounts in which the connection of Withington and Musson to an international celebrity, Wilfred Grenfell, overrode fuller considerations of their own lives, careers, and experiences. Finally, this examination suggests possible differences in their volunteerism between women physicians and their male counterparts: along with other women professionals, medical women often incorporated volunteer vacation experience into a continuum of similar endeavors in their careers.