On the last day of June, Yorkton's Dr. Ivan E. Daunt stepped down from the Broadway Street clinic where he has practiced for the last 45 years.
The doctor held no elaborate retirement party - that was gotten out of the way last year when the medical and nursing staff organized a "recognition night" on his behalf.
"I think it was a hint which I didn't take," jokes Dr. Daunt.
But now, at the age of 84, after 61 years in medicine, one of the longest-serving doctors in the province has hung up his stethoscope. It's been a long journey to this point.
In his six-decade career, Daunt has seen the field of medicine revolutionized more than once by new treatments and new diagnostic tools such as CT scanning and MRI. In his lifetime, he witnessed the greatest revolution of them all: the discovery and rise of antibiotics.
It was a development that would affect the lives of everyone in the world, including the Daunt family. When the doctor was a boy growing up in Ireland, his 13-year-old brother cut his knee in a minor fall at school. With no antibiotics yet available, Daunt's brother, "a healthy farm boy," died shortly afterwards of an infection.
"That kind of encouraged me to get into medicine," Daunt says.
At the age of 17, Daunt enrolled in University College Cork, a constituent university of the National University of Ireland, to study medicine.
"I set out to be a broad-based, good GP, really," says Daunt. "When I was a young fellow, there weren't many doctors and you had to cover all the bases."
It's something the doctor misses about that earlier era, when medicine was more of a "grassroots profession." Daunt recalls a fraternity of physicians and surgeons with the flexibility to assist one another in differing roles with each day. Today, an increasing bulk of knowledge and a change in the medical culture encourages young doctors to specialize, and to do so early.
"I don't think it's as satisfying as a profession, not quite as fulfilling as it used to be," Daunt says.
After becoming licensed in 1950, Daunt himself went on to obtain specialty training in general surgery, but continued to see patients as a general practitioner throughout his entire career.
Finding difficulty obtaining work in Ireland, Daunt headed for England, where many jobs for doctors were available under the new National Health Service.
"We thought they were well paid at the time, but they weren't," he recalls. "My first job was 350 a year, which is about $700. And that was 18 hours a day.
"You were so busy, you even saved a few dollars from that, because you didn't have time to spend it."
But the sheer number of patients provided "great experience" for a young doctor learning on the job, says Daunt.
"You might do eight wrist fractures in a morning, things like that."
After twelve years of British practice, marriage to his wife Bonnie in 1951, and a three-year national service stint in Hong Kong, Daunt one day caught news of an opportunity overseas.
"There was a big ad in the journal: $18,000 a year in Saskatchewan. That was six times what I was getting."
Through an old friend who had emigrated to Wadena, Daunt's name reached recruiters in Invermay, and he began receiving calls asking him to come. But the doctor was still reluctant.
"My concept of Canada was ice and snow. It was the last place on Earth, really, I wanted to come. But then they said, 'It's beautiful here. There's lakes and gorgeous summers.'" Daunt began to wear down.
In 1962, with first-class tickets paid for by his new employers, Daunt and his family - now a wife and four children - boarded the Empress of England in Liverpool and arrived in Canada.
In Invermay, Daunt learned a definition of "general medicine" broader than anything he had ever imagined.
"I was the only doctor for 30 miles all around. I was the dentist and the vet and everything."
The doctor remembers one occasion when the chairman of the health board accidentally shot his dog and brought it in to Daunt's office. Despite a clean wound through its chest, the dog, recalls Daunt, "seemed to be fine." An x-ray confirmed that no serious damage had been done.
"I reassured the guy that he hadn't fatally injured his dog, so he was happy."
Saturday-night dentistry became another habit for the doctor.
"The drunk guys would come in with a terrible toothache and I had a set of instruments to do a little dentistry. I tried to be useful."
After three years in Invermay, Daunt moved to Saskatoon for a year before finally accepting a standing offer to come to Yorkton in 1966. He has remained here - working out of the same Broadway clinic - ever since.
From the start, Daunt found Yorkton to be a good place to work, with an endless stream of challenging cases and strong support from other doctors.
"You had a good opportunity to practice up to your ability."
At this time, Daunt was encouraged to finish the postgraduate studies he had begun in Britain, receiving his Canadian Board Certification in General Surgery in the early 1970s.
And the Canadian winters turned out to be more manageable than he had feared; in 1973, Daunt and his family began making regular trips even further north to the Yukon.
Between the 1970s and the 1990s, Daunt made two short-lived forays into politics as a candidate for the Progressive Conservative Party: first provincially and later federally.
"Luckily I didn't get elected," he says.
The surgeon didn't require a political seat to have his voice heard. Though quiet and unassuming, he was a thorn in the side of his superiors on more than one occasion for his outspoken opinions on the top-down administration of healthcare and the treatment of local doctors.
Although the surgical procedures performed by Daunt "wound down" as he got older, the doctor worked full-time hours between the hospital and his clinic immediately up to his retirement. He continued making occasional house calls into his 80s - one of the last doctors in the province to do so.
"When you go out, you learn what you're missing by not doing house calls," says Daunt. "You get to know people in a way you never could otherwise."
Bonnie died a year and a half ago after 57 years of marriage, and she and Daunt's six children - two born in Britain, two in Hong Kong, and two in Canada - have spread themselves across the world. Dr. Daunt has decided it's at last time to retire.
"I try to keep busy mentally and physically, which is maybe why I've kept going so long."
Daunt doesn't intend to slow down much in retirement. He'll be visiting his children on four different continents, prospecting a claim in the Yukon that he and his wife purchased "in a weak moment," and following local and international events.
He intends to keep living in his house in Yorkton, the place that has been home for most of his long life.
"I've been very happy and I've worked with some wonderful people. Overall, it's been quite an experience."
