When he was eight years old, George Stewart-Hunter helped nurse an injured bird back to health.
"I gave it some chloroform, put it to sleep, set the wing, bandaged it,” he said.
Almost 90 years later, he still works as a healer, with humans rather than birds.
For the past 43 years, he has worked every day at the Vermilion Health Centre.
He tried to retire two decades ago, at age 76, but the one-time race car driver, pilot and all-around daredevil just couldn’t stay away.
"What's my secret to being 96?” he asked in a recent interview with CBC News. “Working,” he said. “There you go. Just keep on doing what you want.”
Originally trained as a surgeon in Britain, Stewart-Hunter graduated in 1946 from the University of Liverpool.
As a teenager during the Second World War, he was offered a job driving an ambulance. His father was commanding officer of emergency services for South Merseyside at the time. Stewart-Hunter said he got the job because he didn’t need a licence; Britain had suspended that requirement during the war.
The German Blitz was in full effect, and bombs were raining down on cities like Liverpool.
Stewart-Hunter and his partner were dispatched to a local pub that had been flattened by a bomb. The patrons were safe, however, hiding in the cellar filled with barrels of beer.
"When those guys came up the ladder they could barely stand, they were so drunk it was unbelievable," he recalled.
He offered the patrons a ride home in the ambulance. Just then, a house down the road was hit by a bomb and exploded.
“These guys in the cellar looked at that and they said, ‘Come with you? Not ruddy likely!’ And they all went back down into the cellar and pulled the hatch down.”
After his stint driving ambulance he went on to graduate with a degree in surgery. He then joined the Royal Air Force and went to Singapore, where he thought he would get work as a surgical specialist.
‘Deliver that baby!’
Once he got there, the obstetrician in charge was too sick to work and was sent home to Britain, so Stewart-Hunter had to take over.
A nurse spotted the tags on his collar and asked if he was a doctor. When he said yes, she told him: “Deliver that baby! We’re in trouble!”
He went on to deliver 10 babies that first day. Since then, he estimates he has delivered more than 2,000 during his career.
Three weeks of training was his introduction to obstetrics, a specialty that ended up taking him to Africa and Australia, where he lectured university students on obstetrics.
In the late 1960s, while he was back in Britain, a job offer arrived from Canada. He and his family eventually settled in Vermilion in 1976, where he carried on with obstetrics.
Kathy Beckett, care manager for long-term care at the Vermilion nursing home, works closely with Dr. Stewart-Hunter. He delivered all three of her children.
She has worked with the doctor in the nursing home since 2006.
"We should have cloned him about 40 years ago,” she said. “Then the young Stewart-Hunter could learn from the old Stewart-Hunter. We don't know what we'll do when he's not here.”
Twenty years ago he traded in delivering babies and doing surgical work to focus on geriatrics, and has spent the last 20 years helping the region’s palliative care patients.
"I'm now a little older, just a little,” he said. “I don't do any surgery anymore.”
He also spends time every month teaching a painting class for patients. Many of his own paintings line the hospital walls.
Beckett said the doctor has been an invaluable resource for the region, though his health is now failing. Macular degeneration and hearing loss have slowed him down.
Nurses accompany him during his rounds these days to help him communicate with patients.
‘Quite the character’
“He’s quite the character, isn’t he?” asked Catharina Landry, who has been a long-term patient at the nursing home since 2014.
Landry said she looks forward to the doctor’s daily visits.
“He's not necessarily that serious. I mean, when it's needed to be, yeah. But it's really fun to be with him at times, too,” she said.
Despite his age and failing health, he returns to the hospital daily, scampering around like someone 30 years younger.
He once raced cars and used to fly his own airplanes.
Shortly before his birthday in July, he was stopped for speeding.
"I do silly things,” he said. “I just bought a motorbike. I didn't bring it, because I haven't even ridden it yet. It's in the shed in the back."
Soon that motorcycle will be seen roaring through Vermilion.
