A wartime surgeon lieutenant commander with the Royal Canadian Navy, Dr Carlton G. Smith, MD, PhD, Professor (Emeritus), now 97 years young, served at sea during the Battle of the Atlantic. A member of RUSI of VI and despite some vision impairment, he continues to enjoy our luncheon meetings thanks to his volunteer driver, Mrs. Dorothy Graham.

Dr. Smith has pursued a lifetime interest studying the human nervous system. He has been a medical researcher both in Canada and the United States and also with the RCN. He started as a naval medical researcher and then a physician aboard frigates and HMCS MIDDLESEX, an Algerine escort, on convoy duty in the Western Atlantic, all between 1942 and VE-Day 1945.

(The Algerines were the largest of our minesweepers and slightly larger than corvettes. They were especially favoured as Senior Officers’ ships in the Western Local Escort Groups.)

A native of Berlin (later Kitchener, Ont.), Dr. Smith graduated in medicine from the University of Toronto in 1935. He immediately pursued his interest in the human nervous system, studying under Dr. Best (of Banting and Best fame) who was head of physiology at U of T. He continued his research in 1937 under Dr. Grant, professor of anatomy, and studied the human brain. This became his lifetime vocation.

Later in 1937, without a dedicated Canadian research unit to study the brain, he moved to Cornell University, then in Ithaca, NY, to join Dr. Papes. Their work on the brain revealed the details of the thalamus. This led into research of the mechanisms of emotion and a whole new research field of associated drugs.

Dr. Carlton Smith returned to Toronto in 1939 at the beginning of the war. He re-joined Dr. Best who was forming a medical research unit for the Royal Canadian Navy. His commissioning as a surgeon lieutenant evoked some jubilation. He found that his Lt’s navy pay would be the princely sum of $3,000 per year, dwarfing his research salary of $2,400 per annum at the U of T. He joined the naval research unit at Halifax in Sept. 1942, and thereafter took his turn as a medical officer with convoy escort groups on the North Atlantic.

The research unit was totally involved in researching night vision at sea and measuring the night vision sensitivity of all ships’ officers and crews. Developing a suitable seasickness drug was the next project. Smith, and other researchers, tested the experimental pills while aboard a new landing craft, designed for D-Day, and crashing ashore in the roughest of seas available.

Surg. LCdr Smith joined HMCS MIDDLESEX in June 1944 and made several more trips escorting convoys from New York and Halifax through to the Mid-Ocean Meeting Point, and return. His greatest fear was the prospect of having to do surgery aboard ship under appalling septic conditions. The surgeons also had to be prepared for transfer between ships to treat sick sailors. He said the prospect of transfer between ships in the stormy North Atlantic was not a happy one. He did not have occasion to transfer but once, he had been strapped into the bosun’s chair before the transfer was–thankfully–cancelled.

Some surgeons were lost at sea when Canadian ships, such as the OTTAWA, were sunk by U-Boats.

Dr. Smith’s war ended May 9, the day after VE-Day, when his convoy reached New York with all lights blazing because the war had ended.

He returned to U of T as a professor of medicine in 1945 teaching the large numbers of veterans who had returned to medical school after the war. He continued his neurological research work with the human brain and the spinal cord. After retiring from U of T, he spent two years in Bethesda, Maryland as head of their Department of Anatomy.

On retiring to Victoria, Surg. LCdr Carlton Smith joined RUSI of VI in 1988. He resides in Sidney.

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