The Almonte Medical Triumvirate Part 3: Dr. Kelly

Dr. J.K. Kelly

Dr. John King Kelly was a respected doctor who practiced medicine for almost half a century in Almonte.

Born in 1874 in Almonte, he attended Almonte High School and graduated from McGill University’s medical school in 1896. Due to his arthritis, which led to use of a wheelchair during his university studies, he was told he would never become a doctor. Not deterred, he returned to Almonte to open a medical practice. After his first wife, Mayme Price, tragically passed away, he married Gertrude Shields in 1909.

Dr. J. K. Kelly

At first, Dr. Kelly worked with Dr. Lynch. Eventually, he took over the office of Dr. Burns and opened his own practice. Mrs. Kelly would often accompany the doctor as he made his rounds to care for patients by horse and buggy. They had two children, J. Thorpe and Elizabeth Kelly.

The North Lanark Regional Museum interviewed a local resident who remembers being a patient of the doctor. She was born at home and delivered by Dr. Kelly. This was an era when payment for medical care could include barter and exchange of goods.

Our doctor was Dr. Kelly from Almonte, and sometimes it was two dollars and sometimes it wasn’t anything. And as a little girl … my legs were quite crippled and … my parents would take me, and he would work with my legs. And in later years I used to think, ‘How did my father have two dollars for every trip?’ And it ended up that my father traded frog’s legs to Dr. Kelly and his family in exchange for a doctors fee.

Dr. Kelly served as Almonte’s Medical Officer of Health. In this position, he was responsible for communicable disease control, among other duties. By the late nineteenth century, Louis Pasteur’s discoveries had started to change the way medicine was practiced. Armed with knowledge about microorganisms and disease transmission, Dr. Kelly worked to increase sanitation and prevent disease to keep the community healthy.

He also contributed to life in town through his involvement with the Almonte Hockey Club. “He took great pride in its record-breaking achievements,” writes local historian John Dunn, “and he made it a small private rule never to charge a fee for repairs to an athlete’s scrapes, bruises, burns or breaks.”

When he retired in 1945, he moved from his residence and office on Little Bridge Street. As reported in the Almonte Gazette on December 2, 1954, “Dr. J.K. Kelly, one of those general practitioners whose life of hardship and sacrifice endeared him to large rural communities, died at his home on Elgin Street, Almonte, Tuesday afternoon, aged 80 years.”