A Sort of Peace Corps

Sir Wilfred Grenfell was one of the great humanitarians of the twentieth century. This English surgeon founded a medical mission in 1892 that strove for more than eighty years to serve the impoverished people of Labrador and northern Newfoundland. His mission brought medical care, schools, and orphanages to coastal villages beset by untreated disease and injuries, malnutrition, and poverty. This book is about the mission and its volunteers (some famous in their later years, most of them not), what they did, what effect they had on people’s lives and how the experience affected them. They were in fact a sort of Peace Corps. An abundance of historical data is woven into numerous enthralling stories including the gripping account of Grenfell’s perilous adventure on a drifting ice pan. Many accounts are given first-hand. Recruits (3,500 of them) came from every walk of life, and included Frances Sayre, Cyrus Vance, Nelson and Laurance Rockefeller, and Henry Cabot Lodge. Ninety percent of the corps came from the United States, making this America’s first major overseas volunteer movement.