Parker, Daniel McNeill

  • DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ARTICLE: Colin D. Howell, “PARKER, DANIEL McNEILL,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 13, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/parker_daniel_mcneill_13E.html
  • DCB profile notes:
    • Physician and politician; b. 28 April 1822 in Windsor, N.S., son of Francis Parker and Mary Janet McNeill of Petite (Walton), N.S.; m. first 9 June 1847, in Halifax, Eliza Ritchie Johnston (d. 1852), eldest daughter of James William Johnston; m. secondly 26 Aug. 1854 Fanny Holmes Black, also in Halifax, and they had six children, two of whom died young; d. there 4 Nov. 1907.
    • The son of a magistrate and Baptist deacon from Hants County, Daniel McNeill Parker spent six years in public school in Petite before studying at King’s College School and Horton Academy. He began his medical training as an apprentice to William Bruce Almon in Halifax, where he learned to prepare and dispense medicines, dress wounds, extract teeth, and, eventually, prescribe for patients. In 1842 Parker enrolled at the University of Edinburgh, where he completed a thesis entitled “The management of parturition.” He graduated in 1845 with the gold medal in anatomy, although a dispute with the professor of botany almost denied him his degree. While at Edinburgh, Parker spent his summer vacations as a clinical clerk to the celebrated physician James Young Simpson.
    • In 1845 Parker returned to Nova Scotia and quickly established a lucrative private practice in Halifax. Like many of his colleagues, he involved himself in a number of charitable ventures, attending periodically at the Poor’s Asylum and working with William Grigor at his dispensary to provide care to the sick poor. On 5 Feb. 1848, at the Poor’s Asylum, Parker witnessed William Johnston Almon make the first use of chloroform in surgery in Nova Scotia.
    • Despite important advances in surgery, the mid-19th-century medical profession in Halifax faced considerable public suspicion, the challenge of irregular practice, and outright quackery, and it struggled to establish its claims to authority and public confidence. These handicaps may explain the extensive involvement of doctors such as Parker, W. J. Almon, and Grigor in politics and charitable work and in the establishment of institutions which enshrined contemporary definitions of scientific medicine and social improvement.
    • On 1 Aug. 1895 Parker completed 50 years of practice. A delegation of his medical colleagues visited his home in Dartmouth and read a complimentary address. Parker’s formal reply, a reminiscence of his years in the profession, was carried in the Maritime Medical News in October. In addition to recapitulating the advances in medical practice and surgery over that period, Parker warned of the tendency of medical schools to open their doors to anyone who would pay the fee and blamed “overcrowding” of the profession on the tendency of the sons of farmers and mechanics to aspire to professional status. “The fact has been established by statistics,” he wrote, “that the due or proper proportion which should exist between these professions, and the population, has ceased to exist.”
    • Although Parker retired from medical practice in 1895, he maintained his seat in the Legislative Council until 1901. He died six years later.
  • Great Grandson of United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=9832
  • Find a GRAVE: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/196960376/daniel-mcneill-parker