Remembering Jimmy Quayle
CMAJ 1997;157:876
Your brief death notice for BC plastic surgeon Jimmy Quayle (CMAJ 1997;157:115) gave short shrift to a fine physician.
While at McGill University during World War II, he and 2 classmates were commissioned into the Royal Canadian Regiment (RCR). In December 1943 the regiment had 3 weeks of vicious fighting defending the Allied approach to Ortona, Italy, which later became known as Royal Canadian Avenue. It was here that Captain Mitch Sterlin and Lieutenant Jimmy Quayle wrote themselves into the regimental annals because of their defence of "Sterlin Castle," a farmhouse of strategic importance. Their platoon, reduced to 6 men, battled all day to hold it before being forced to pull back.
Quayle's 2 classmates, Sterlin and Ian Wilson, were to die within months of one another. "I was destined to carry on," Quayle recalled, "but things were never the same after their deaths. A part of my youth vanished in wartime Italy."
By the time the war ended, Jimmy Quayle had been wounded 4 times -- a regimental record -- and was still only 21. He graduated from McGill in 1950 and may have decided to specialize in plastic surgery because of his war service. In 1957 he settled in New Westminster, becoming the first plastic surgeon in BC to practise outside Vancouver.
In 1995, when the Dutch marked the 50th anniversary of their liberation, Quayle returned to Holland, where the town of Apeldoorn still remembers the RCR. In 1945 a German V-1 rocket had been flying over the city as Quayle, by then a captain, was marching his company into town. It suddenly dove to earth a few hundred yards away. With the company sergeant major marching backward to keep a stern eye on the men, Jimmy Quayle led his troops through the smoke and dust of the explosion without breaking step. The incident, suitably embellished, soon entered regimental lore.
Today's physicians would do well to remember doctors like Jimmy Quayle with admiration and pride.
John O'Brien-Bell, MB, BS
Chief of Staff
Surrey Memorial Hospital
Surrey, BC
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