Although respected as a skilled and compassionate physician, it is his ability to write interesting memorable prose that immortalizes Dr. Earle Parkhill Scarlett. In an interview, Dr. Scarlett once stated that in his life, at least, the pencil was greater than the stethoscope.

Born in High Bluff, Manitoba, Scarlett received his B.A. from the University of Manitoba before joining the Canadian Machine Gun Corps in 1916. Gassed in France in 1917, he was severely injured during the battle of Arras, receiving numerous shrapnel wounds.

Following World War I, Scarlett enrolled in the medical school at the University of Toronto. There his propensity for writing and editing was evident when he founded the University of Toronto Medical Journal.

After graduation in 1924, Scarlett married, then interned at Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital. After moving to Iowa City in 1925 where he earned a fellowship, he returned to Canada by 1930 and became an internist with the Calgary Associate Clinic, a position he held for three decades. During the 1930s, Scarlett’s interest in history and his passion for writing merged. As a student, Scarlett had worked for the CPR during the summer as a conductor. At that time he developed a lifelong fascination with the Canadian Rockies and his western roots. Now, with colleagues, he established an Historical Night where he and other practitioners gave monthly talks about historical persons and events in medicine. An early emphasis focused on some of the colourful characters who had brought modern medicine to Alberta’s Bow River Valley. But the scope soon encompassed all of medical history, with Scarlett himself paying special attention to literary physicians. Thus he spoke about writers such as John Keats, Oliver Goldsmith, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Anton Chekhov, as well as about the medical content of Dickens’ novels, Moliére’s plays, and McCrae’s poetry. He was acknowledged as an international authority on John Keats.

Soon after the initiation of Historical Nights, it became apparent that the many talks deserved publication. The presentations on early Alberta physicians often contained information based on personal experience that would otherwise be lost unless recorded. Scarlett successfully proposed that the Clinic publish an historical journal. Upon agreeing, the Clinic then decided that, as a cultural service to an international profession, the Calgary Associate Clinic Historical Bulletin would be distributed free to any physician or library requesting it. So the CACHB was born in 1936!

Earle Scarlett was the first, last, and only editor of the CACHB, which appeared quarterly until 1958. It was the first journal exclusively devoted to medical history to be published in Canada. Its demise reflected both Scarlett’s impending retirement and an accelerating cost to the partners in the Clinic.
 

A Manitoba-born Renaissance man, Earle Parkhill Scarlett was as much an arts student as he was a much respected physician. [Photo Courtesy Charles G. Roland]

A Renaissance man, Scarlett was the president of the Calgary Association Clinic for several years, a Fellow of both the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada and of the American College of Physicians, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Foothills Hospital in Calgary. Outside medicine, he served on the Board of the Calgary Symphony Orchestra, the Vancouver Festival Society, and the Classical Club of Calgary. He had a connection with the Royal Canadian College of Organists and was a playing member of the Calgary Baroque Recorder Group. From 1952 until 1958 Scarlett was Chancellor of the University of Calgary.

Scarlett’s writing was not confined to the Bulletin. Scientific articles appeared in most of the major medical journals of North America and the United Kingdom. In medical-historical and medical-cultural matters, his pen worked prodigiously. For many years he wrote a column entitled “The Medical Jackdaw” in the journal Group Practice, and another called “Doctor Out of Zebulon” in Archives of Internal Medicine. Some of the main highlights of this huge output of sparkling writing have been collected in an anthology, In Sickness and in Health. One example typifies his colourful diction:

By and large, all the real, elemental jests
against physicians are at least a thousand
unfavourable comment; and the changes have
century to century. But on the balance,
criticism and praise seem pretty well to
cancel out. And indeed in the long
perspective of history, such squibs are the
small beer of the medical chronicles.

At the end of a biographical resume, Scarlett noted: “In spite of all that has been set down above, the subject of this inventory is still the bemused boy, sitting in the back row of the cosmic theatre just as he did long ago in the medical theatre of Toronto Varsity, and listening, and making notes – and wondering.”

Scarlett’s own wondering stopped, finally, in 1982, when he died after suffering several devastating heart attacks. His writings preserve his memory, as does the fact that there is a high school in Calgary named after him.
Charles Roland