A century of Dr. Charles Godfrey: a life book-ended by pandemics

“Every day, I wake up amazed I’m still alive,” Dr. Charles Godfrey once told me. This was after his 100th birthday and it seemed he was slightly puzzled by his longevity. It came with mixed feelings. On the one hand, he missed having friends from his own generation to connect with—most had passed years or decades earlier, including his wife Margaret and one of his sons who was in his seventies. On the other hand, he radiated optimism and loved having yet another day to pursue his interests: medicine, Canadian military history, travel, people and family. He died on July 24, 2022—just shy of his 105th birthday. He was already planning a big party. He practiced medicine until age 102. When he retired in August of 2020, he was arguably Canada’s oldest practicing physician. He left, not because he lost interest in medicine, but because of caution around COVID and his age. Dr. Godfrey was a regular at the ‘coffee club’—a group of us who met at a café in the small town of Madoc, Ontario not far from his home. On a given Saturday, there might be four people, or ten. The mix might include, authors, a coffee shop owner, a pair of retired documentary-makers, artists, a local doctor, an engineer, a high school teacher. The thing that brought us together was a chance to spend time with the remarkable Dr. Godfrey. For him it was a chance to enjoy the different perspectives such a mixed group brought to the conversations. He was one of the few people who remembered my grandfather, Dr. Gordon Bates a public health figure, and for me it was lovely connecting with someone from that generation. He led a remarkable life, and even near the end didn’t look a day over 80. While he lived in a bright house in the country surrounded by fields, an apple orchard and a pond, he was not a smalltown doctor. Up until he retired, he was still commuting (a three-hour drive) to Toronto to work at the Albany Clinic two to three days a week. After he stopped driving in his late-90s, his son drove him to Belleville where he took the train to the city—even at 101. He then used public transit to get to his various destinations. In the city, he stayed in a flat walking-distance from the clinic he worked in. Dr. Godfrey began practicing medicine in 1953, though prior to that he was a physiotherapist. He qualified as a specialist in rehabilitative medicine in 1958. He served with the Royal Canadian Air Force from 1940 to 1945 with the Medical Services, then later worked with returned prisoners of war (POWs) in rehabilitation centres. He was known internationally for his work with veterans suffering from PTSD. He wrote seven books, numerous articles, and for years was a regular contributor to the Medical Post. A member of the Royal Canadian Military Institute (RCMI), he developed military history plays that were performed there. The play group was called the ARSEY M.I. THESPIANS—a name Dr. Godfrey came up with. A remembrance sent to RCMI members stated he “always had a mischievous mind…. We performed historical plays - everything from the Russian Revolution to the Indian Mutiny, we called him ‘Our Leader and Guiding Light’.” It added that he “organized singalong musical evenings which were not to be missed, provided your earplugs were primed and loaded.” RCMI members were also treated to his lively lectures on Canadian military history. Activist, politician, international volunteer Dr. Godfrey lobbied for non-smokers rights, fought against the building of an airport in Pickering Ontario, and was active in other community level endeavours. In the mid-1970s, he joined the NDP and was elected to the Ontario legislature for Durham West. Over the decades, Dr. Godfrey travelled to over 22 countries where he did volunteer work, often under CARE Canada. He frequently travelled with his wife, a nurse. From 1983 to 1985, he chaired CARE/MEDICO and eventually chaired its International Health Advisory Committee. In 1986, he received the organization's Distinguished Service Award. He told me he went to Afghanistan about 10 years in a row. Most years, he made one to two trips to India to volunteer at leprosy camps. Even in his late nineties he travelled to at least half a dozen overseas destinations each year. It was for his international work that he was invested into the Order of Canada in 1989. In 1996 he was named to the Order of Ontario for his work on the rehabilitation of cancer patients. He published numerous studies on rehabilitative medicine and was a professor of physiatry, physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of Toronto for two decades. Art of medicine changed Dr. Godfrey lamented some of the changes he saw in medicine over the decades. While he appreciated improvements in technology, new medications, and a changing population, he felt the ethos of medicine had gone downhill. Today, doctors don’t (or can’t) spend as much time with their patients. They don’t talk to or listen to them as well as they could, he said. He blamed this partly on the use of computers (though he also recognized the evolving workplace challenges doctors faced). “[William] Osler said ‘listen to your patients, he will tell you what’s the matter with him or her’,” he said. “When I started 53 years ago, I wrote everything down on a piece of paper and we kept our notes. Now we have the computer right beside us. That’s very handy, it cuts down a lot of your work time. But you have to be careful the computer doesn’t start running your diagnosis,” he said in an interview in 2011. But computers affect patients too. “Now, if you listen to your patients, he just tells you what he read on the Internet last night. The big change is how much involvement the person has with himself, that is, the patient with the patient.” A specific ailment can behave differently between individuals, and so can what doctors do about it. There are many things the computer doesn’t understand. “The art of being able to counsel your patient in certain areas, not acting as a psychotherapist but acting as a wise counsellor, that’s pretty well gone by the board. The time-frame nowadays doesn’t allow you to do that, it isn’t part of the culture of medicine these days,” he said. For first visits, he still spent an hour with each patient. Dr. Godfrey’s life was book-ended by pandemics. When he was born in September 1917, the Spanish flu pandemic was near. At the end, he saw the COVID pandemic—though he personally evaded both diseases. If anyone had a life well spent, it was Dr. Godfrey.

A century of Dr. Charles Godfrey: a life book-ended by pandemics

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