Margaret and Charley

The Personal Story of Dr. Charles Best, the Co-Discoverer of Insulin

Henry B.M. Best

• Publisher: Dundurn Press
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781459712751
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

Although Charles Best is known for discovering insulin, the story of his life neither begins nor ends with that one moment. Not only did he make many other discoveries, he was also one half of an extraordinary couple who, during their almost sixty years together, were involved in many of the significant events of the twentieth century. Margaret & Charley is the story of these two people from their beginnings on the east coast at the turn of the century through the years that followed. Through diaries, scrapbooks, photograph albums, and other documentation, the details of their lives are shared with the reader.

Chapter One

Salt in Their Veins,
1899–1920

The Bests and the Fishers

Charles Herbert Best was proud of his roots in the Maritime provinces of Canada. Six generations before Charley, the first Best in Nova Scotia was William, a master stone mason, whose name appears in the records of Fort Louisbourg in 1747. When Louisbourg was returned to France, William Best and his close friend Sergeant John Burbidge, both originally from Hampshire, England, moved with the rest of the garrison to take part in the founding of Halifax in 1749. Both men were merchants and builders, and both were elected wardens of St. Paul’s Church of England, the first non-Catholic church in Acadia. William Best, master mason in charge of building the foundations, billed Governor Cornwallis, “To your order for the masons to drink on your laying the foundation stone of the church — 3 pounds,” and added a reward for a rescue from the outhouse: “To cash ordered to Daniel Dunn for [fetching] your Honrs watch out of the Little house — 5 shillings.”³ Later first Burbidge, then Best moved to Cornwallis on the Minas Basin in the Annapolis Valley, but they both represented Halifax in the first elected assembly in British North America, which met in Halifax in 1758–9. John, a son of William, married a niece of John Burbidge.

Their great-grandson John Burbidge Best II was the grandfather of Charles Herbert Best. At Grafton, further up the Annapolis Valley from Cornwallis, he had an orchard and engaged in mixed farming. His wife, Isabella Adalia Woodworth, came from a New England “Planter” family, one of those that emigrated from the Thirteen Colonies to take up lands from which the Acadians had been expelled.

Their son, Herbert Huestis Best, was born in 1871, the eighth of eleven children and the seventh boy. He taught school in Grafton and Woodville and then attended Dalhousie University in Halifax in 1893–4, intending to transfer to McGill University in Montréal to study medicine, but a bout of typhoid fever forced him to drop out. He then went to New York City, where his sister Anna was a nurse, and she was able to help him with his expenses. He enrolled at the University of the City of New York, receiving a diploma in operative surgery in 1895, and became an MD in 1896.⁴

While in New York, Herbert Best met a second cousin who had been born on a farm near Waterville, just a few miles from his own home at Grafton. She was Luella May (Lulu) Fisher. Her father, James E. Fisher, died of sunstroke when she was only one year old; her mother, Eunice Louise Woodworth, was a first cousin of Herbert Best’s mother. Both women suffered from depression. Lulu Fisher was raised by Harmon Newcomb and his wife, Isabella Fisher, sister of Lulu’s late father. Newcomb was a ship’s carpenter, and the family lived in a small house that he had built on the mud banks of the Cornwallis River at Port Williams.

When she was a young adult, Lulu Newcomb, as she became known, crossed the Minas Basin, possibly from Apple Tree Landing (now Canning) or from Kingsport, to Advocate Harbour in Cumberland County, where she taught school for two years.

Herbert Best and Lulu Newcomb married in New York on 4 May 1896, the day before the fifty-fifth annual commencement of the University of the City of New York Medical Department, held in Carnegie Music Hall. Almost immediately, the young couple set off for the State of Maine where Dr. Herbert Best began his long career as a country doctor. For a short time he was in partnership with his older brother, Dr. O. Fletcher Best, in Patten, but for most of his life he was in sole practice further north in the state at West Pembroke. West Pembroke is situated on Cobscook Bay, off Passamaquoddy Bay, twenty-eight miles south by road from the international border at Calais, Maine and St. Stephen, New Brunswick. By the time Herbert and Lulu arrived, the ship building, lumbering, and iron works were gone. It was not a rich area with the inhabitants involved in a combination of farming, wood-cutting, and fishing. Sardine packing was an important source of employment between 1885 and 1960.

At first, Herbert and Lulu Best lived in the rented “McLaughlin House” in West Pembroke. There, Charley’s sister, Isabella Hilda Best, was born on 23 February 1898. “Lulu confined. Baby born at 6:30 am. Dr. Byron up. Both well. Greatest storm of the season. Hail, sleet, and wind.” In May, there is another entry, “Baby Hilda is ten weeks old today. Well and strong. Lulu really well.”⁵

On 6 November 1898, the Bests moved across the road to the “Murray House,”⁶ a typical rambling New England house, painted white with green shutters. It was there that Charles Herbert Best was born on 27 February 1899: “At 10:40, Dr. A.T. Lincoln brought our boy along. I helped and Lulu was more comfortable. Gave chlorol and chloroform. Boy is a good-sized bouncing baby and rests well. Lulu rests well.”⁷

Dr. Arthur Lincoln of nearby Dennysville, a medical graduate of Harvard University, was Dr. Herbert Best’s closest friend. He was a descendant of General Benjamin Lincoln, who had received Lord Cornwallis’s sword in 1781 at Yorktown, Virginia, in the Revolutionary War. He rarely practised his profession, though he had attended Charley’s birth. He became a gifted artist and a great expert on the flora and fauna of the area. John James Audubon named the Lincoln sparrow in honour of his father. Arthur Lincoln’s wife, Anna Maxwell, had auditioned for Sir W.S. Gilbert, Sir Arthur Sullivan, and Richard D’Oyly Carte, and became a principal in the first of their touring companies on the European continent, where she met Dr. Lincoln in Vienna.

Lulu Best was very musical and loved to sing in a clear soprano voice, accompanying herself on the piano or the pump organ. She could play anything by ear and was much in demand at weddings and funerals. Herbert Best especially loved his college songs, spirituals, and hymns, and the two would often sing together. All his life, Charles Best loved the “old songs” — hymns such as “The Old Rugged Cross,” “Unto the Hills Around,” and “Abide with Me;” love songs such as “Silver Threads among the Gold” and “I Cannot Sing the Old Songs;” southern songs such as “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” and, his favourite, “Old Black Joe.”

Dr. Herbert Best once drove his team of trotting horses as far as eighty miles in twenty-four hours to deliver babies in widely separated areas of the large region covered by his practice. He delivered over 1,500 children into the world, and took his seriously ill patients to the Chipman Hospital in St. Stephen, New Brunswick, where there were better facilities. His pocket diaries that have survived give some idea of what he charged — $5 for a confinement and the delivery, which was often paid in kind: a cord of wood, a chicken for the pot, fish or produce.

Robert P. Tristram Coffin, professor of English at Bowdoin College,⁸ wrote the poem “Country Doctor” with Dr. Herbert Best in mind. Later, Professor Coffin prepared a hand-written copy of the poem, illustrated it, and sent it to the delighted son of the subject, “For Charles H. Best, whose father was a country doctor.”

Through rain, through sleet, through ice, through snow,

He went where only God could go,

He drove his old mare out of breath,

Between a baby and a death.

He left an old man in the dark

And blew up a tiny spark

In a young man two feet long

To carry on the dead man’s song.

. . .

Our farms so lonely and spaced far

Could never have grown this nation we are

But for this man, come sun, come snow,

Who went where God alone could go.⁹

— Robert P. Tristram Coffin

Next to the doctor’s office was the main body of the house, then the wood shed, the barn, the carriage house, and finally, in later years, the garage. From the age of seven, Charles Best, with the aid of a step ladder, was able to unharness the team, rub down the horses, feed and water them, and have a new team ready for the next trip, while his father went into the house to have something to eat.

Many of Charley’s earliest recollections were about horses. When he was just four, he and his father brought a racing mare, “Topsy,” to West Pembroke from the Annapolis Valley. Charley remembered “driving with him from Kentville to Digby, Nova Scotia. The mare was then put on the ferry from Digby to Saint John, New Brunswick, and we drove her in two days the one hundred miles to West Pembroke via St. Stephen and Calais.”¹⁰

“My grandparents and their ancestors for many generations had lived in the Annapolis Valley and fast trotting horses were a part of their lives. I remember the birth of a colt when I was four years old. He was named ‘MacDougal’ but we called him ‘Maxie.’ When he was only a few days old, his mother was led from her stall and the lower half of the Dutch door was closed. Maxie was excited and ran around the large box and then to our amazement, he half jumped and slid over the door and triumphantly joined his mother.”¹¹

“My Father and I raced our horses not only in the summer on the tracks or straightaways, but during the winter months when I was home for the Christmas vacations. On the four-mile course, the horses trotted almost all out with the exception of good breathing spaces while going up several long hills. The most exciting racing was on the ice of Pennamaquan Lake . . . Horses properly shod can travel faster on smooth ice than they can on a perfect racetrack. One must set a course and hold to it or the sleigh or sulky will slew, and that can be dangerous. The recollection of the fascinating racing rhythm created by the ‘never-slip’ shoes of the horses, chipping the crisp ice, exhilarates me.”¹²

Herbert Best was a restless man and became dissatisfied with his practice in the small community. On two occasions, he moved his practice elsewhere but soon returned to West Pembroke. In 1904, they moved to Eastport, where, for at least part of the time the nurse was Dr. Best’s older sister, Annie Best Jenkins (Aunt Anna). After two years, the Bests went back to West Pembroke. Apparently, the hospital was not a great financial success. Also, Lulu said that young Charley was getting into trouble “in the city,” having been one of the young boys suspected of setting fire alarms so that they could see the fine team of horses dash out of the fire hall pulling the pumper.

A few months later, Herbert Best decided to accept an invitation to set up practice in Easton, Aroostook County, Maine, 150 miles north, near Presqu’Ile, the Saint John River and Perth-Andover in New Brunswick. “We went in two carriages. My mother and father drove in one and led the colt, Maxie. My sister and I and Cousin Iomene Newcomb from Port Williams, Nova Scotia, were in the second. We had two horses — one in the shafts and a second which was tied to the harness of the other. As I remember it, at age seven, I did most of the driving in our carriage although my cousin was a competent horsewoman.” They arrived at their new residence, “a house about a mile south of Easton. The house was painted yellow and had windows, the top half of which were coloured red. It was a comfortable dwelling but not very attractive. The stable was attached, also the wood shed and carriage house in the New England manner.”¹³

Herbert Best soon had a busy practice in prosperous Aroostook County. “Traffic on the roads was chiefly two-horse teams which carried potatoes from the half-buried storage places at the farms to the high potato barns at the railway stations. In winter, the drivers urged the horses to a fast trot to shorten the time of exposure of their precious and well-covered cargoes. Boys of my age and older would catch rides on the fast-moving sleds and would go for a mile or two in one direction and then find an empty sled for the return journey.”

Charley Best recalled a near disaster: “I went to a school which was about one mile away straight across the fields, much farther by the roads. I used snowshoes in the winter and had no difficulties except on one occasion when I was overcome by the cold and wind. I fell in the snow and was unable to get up. Fortunately, my father saw me and came to the rescue. My face and fingers were frozen.”¹⁴

Dr. Herbert Best did much better financially in Easton, but the family missed the sea, and after two years they returned to Pembroke for good. With them went Charley’s first dog, a collie named Carlo. “When Carlo arrived at the sea he rushed in and began to drink the water. He quickly learned to distinguish between sweet and salty water. He was a fine animal and soon learned to draw me on a sled.” A wealthy farmer in Easton had been very impressed with Maxie, who “had made a reputation for himself on the roads and at the race track in nearby Presqu’Ile.” He wrote to Dr. Best offering $400 for the horse; the two men met halfway and exchanged horses, and the doctor came home with a good profit. He said that Maxie really belonged to Charley and thus the nine year old was able to open his first bank account.

When Charley was twelve, his father bought one of the first cars in the village: an open, red Buick roadster. Dr. Best was away on a call, so the dealer taught Charley how to drive the vehicle. His father was wary of the machine, but a call about an accident at the sawmill in Whiting, nine miles away, prompted him to ask Charley to drive him there. The only comments he made were, “Can’t you go faster? I could have made better time with my horses.” Years later, Charley added, “That was not entirely accurate, as we proved a few days later. We raced car against horse for the twelve miles to Eastport. He passed me again and again by running his mare up the hills while I was in low gear. I passed him on the downgrades and eventually coasted down the hill to the main street of Eastport ahead of him.”¹⁵

Charles Best never forgot Captain William Eldon Leighton, who had commanded the local contingent that went to the Civil War. He owned and operated the Leighton Organ Company from 1880 to 1885, making 600 cases for pump organs that graced many a church, hall, and home. The Best family still has a Leighton organ and also a violin made by the captain from a tabletop.

Herbert Best often used Captain Leighton’s former cottage on Leighton’s Point, four miles from the village. In 1921, he acquired the lease on the property for $500. The cottage overlooked the narrow channel where the tide sped through to fill the passage all the way to Whiting, six miles away. Seals played among the rocks. Lulu Best loved “The Point,” and in winter she would go there on snowshoes, sometimes staying overnight with Albert and Keziah Leighton at their farm nearby. When Captain Leighton became very ill, she looked after him. Charley recalled his mother sitting in the kitchen making over for him a suit that the captain had given her, saying that he would never need it again. Eleanor Mahar Hurst, who went to school with Hilda and Charley in West Pembroke, recalled, “The Bests had no money at all, you know. They were always hard-up. Charley Best always wore the same knickerbocker suit. He got new underwear and socks but he always had the same brown knickerbocker suit.”¹⁶

Nevertheless, CHB recalled that “the whole family went to New York for several weeks in 1912. We travelled by ship, the Calvin Austin, from Eastport to Boston and on to New York City on the Fall River Line of Steamships. We had a wonderful time and saw some of the art galleries, several plays, the Natural History Museum, and a circus in Madison Square Gardens. O...