New exhibit launched at MHV gala

Attendees that were part of a full house gathered for the Mennonite Heritage Village gala on May 22 had their first look at a brand-new exhibit.

Titled Mennonite Medicine: Cures + Curiosities – 1800 to 1850, the exhibit was a long time coming for senior curator Garth Doerksen.

He told the crowd that they began working on this a year ago and were determined not to make the topics so broad that they couldn’t be explored and instead focus on specific topics.

“Distilling those topics that are carved down to about 125 words on a panel is a significant challenge,” he said. “Every word matters.”

What’s on display are dozens of stories and artifacts that tell the tale of the people, medicines and techniques found in Mennonite communities during that era.

One such artifact is a large apothecary bottle that once belonged to midwife Katharina Thiessen. Her practice ended in 1907, and the bottle was passed through the hands of her descendants.

The contents of the bottle are unknown.

The exhibit also includes instruments and stories of bloodletting, a common practice in the early 1800s.

Immigration stories also play a role as getting that medical screening was key to allowing Mennonites to start a new life.

A certificate in the museum’s possession records the arrival of Jacob George Krahn who had injured his hand in a farming accident before immigrating to Canada.

The medical certificate includes a handwritten note from the doctor clarifying that despite his injury he will still “be able to make a living for himself and his family”.

The exhibit also includes a map that shows a self-imposed quarantine with checkpoints in the Molochna colony, in what is present day Ukraine, as they tried to protect themselves from the raging cholera epidemic of the 1830s.

Steinbach too has stories of epidemics and even their own version of Florence Nightingale in the form of Agnes Fast as she took care of the sick during the Spanish flu epidemic from 1918 to 1920.

The exhibit also includes others who were well known such as Dr. John Peters from Grunthal, described as an unconventional healer who once used a gun to scare a teenager in a bid to cure the hiccups.

It includes the tale of a man blinded by cataracts whose sight was restored from a hard hit to the head after he walked into a beam in his barn.

It also includes Peter P. Dyck, a Carman man who suffered paralysis in a vehicle accident in his 20s and invented a motorized bed.

“He was known to travel five or 10 miles outside of Carman on his motorized bed,” Doerksen said.