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Waddell, John, M.D. The late Dr. Waddell, of St. John, New Brunswick, was the son of the Rev. John Waddell, a native of Shotts, Scotland. The latter was educated at Glasgow, and came to Nova Scotia in 1797, and became pastor of the Presbyterian church of Truro. He was married in 1802 to a daughter of Jotham Blanchard (a loyalist from Massachusetts, and a colonel in one of the loyalist regiments). The Rev. Mr. Waddell officiated on the occasion of the opening of the old St. Andrew’s Kirk, in St. John, N.B. (destroyed by the great fire), having delivered the first sermon in the church in which his son, the subject of this sketch, fifty years afterwards became a prominent and influential elder. Dr. Waddell was born in Truro, Nova Scotia, on the 17th of March, 1810. When quite a boy, his mother died. After attending the Grammar school at Truro, kept by Mr. James Irving, he entered the Pictou Academy, under the presidency of Dr. McCulloch (the able Biblical controversialist, whose discussions with Bishop Burke, of Halifax, made his name famous throughout Nova Scotia). After leaving the academy, he went into mercantile business in his native town, and so continued until the autumn of 1833, when he commenced the study of medicine under Dr. Lynds. He next proceeded to Glasgow, Scotland, where he pursued his studies with untiring assiduity, and received his diploma, October 18th, 1839, from the Royal College of Surgeons, London. He then went to Paris, and continued there two years, attending the medical lectures given by some of the most scientific men of the French capital. On his return to Nova Scotia, in 1840, he commenced the practice of medicine in Truro. The same year he married Susan, the only daughter of his first medical teacher, Dr. Lynds. The following year she died. Five years afterwards he married Jane Walker Blanchard, daughter of Edward Blanchard, of Truro. In 1849, Dr. Waddell was appointed by His Excellency, Sir Edmund Head, to the situation of medical superintendent of the New Brunswick Lunatic Asylum, a position whose arduous and multifarious duties he discharged with signal success, until his retirement in the spring of 1876, a period of twenty-seven years. When he took charge of the asylum, at the age of thirty-nine, he was the very personification of vigorous health. He was tall and finely proportioned. Humanly speaking there was in him the promise of the attainment of a life of four score years and more. He sprang from a long-lived race. His step was elastic and his form erect; his mind was buoyant and full of love for the work he had but just undertaken. By his kind and gentlemanly manner, he was singularly capable of dealing with those unfortunates who required so much of paternal care and solicitude. And yet, with this urbanity and goodness, there was firmness of character, so much required by the rules of discipline, which never failed to exact obedience, but it was the obedience of a child to a parent. When Dr. Waddell assumed the duties of his office, there were but eighty patients in the establishment, which number gradually increased until the figures reached, at the time of his retirement, three hundred, besides about fifty domestics. With every successive year, from 1849, there was a steady increase of work—work of the most sorrowful description—and with it a corresponding amount of care, anxiety and responsibility. And yet, Dr. Waddell worked on, day after day, in the same unwearied round for twenty-seven years, devoting the flower of his days, his vigour, his manhood to a task which led ultimately to the destruction of a once powerful constitution. At the earnest request of his family—whose members had always been closely knit and compacted together by the most tender cords of affection—he retired from the asylum in the spring of 1876, under the expectation that with rest and freedom from care and anxiety, he would be enabled to take a new lease of life. But instead of that repose for which retirement was sought, it was found that a change from an active to a passive life was more than his shattered constitution could withstand. The day he laid down his staff and turned his back upon the asylum he loved so well and served so faithfully, that day Dr. Waddell’s work upon earth was ended. Bowed down with the infirmities of a premature old age, he lingered till August 29th, 1878, when he passed away at the age of sixty-eight. Probably no man in the province of New Brunswick was better or more generally known than Dr. Waddell, and there are few whose name and works will be held in more grateful remembrance by its inhabitants. His only surviving child, Susan Lynds (by his second marriage), was married August 30th, 1881, to the Rev. Lorenzo Gorham Stevens, rector of St. Luke’s Church, Portland, St. John, N.B., a sketch of whose life will be found elsewhere.