Tillson Harrison

After World War I, Harrison traveled the Middle East performing medical duties such as treating prostitutes afflicted with venereal disease in Constantinople and operating an X-ray facility in Lod, Mandatory Palestine.^[3] Although still not legally divorced from his first two wives, Harrison married Filomena Abela, a Maltese woman at Alexandria in 1920. However, the newlyweds could not find escape from the adventure that had followed Harrison all his life. Harrison and his new wife's train was ambushed by a band of Syrians disillusioned with a group of politicians. The quick thinking of the recently thrice-married physician prevented his new wife's broken leg from developing into gangrene.^[1][4][5]

Still in charge of the Constantinople hospital, he attempted to elope with one of his patients, but was captured and tried for breach of conduct, as the female patient was in fact the wife of a Turkish officer. While being deported to Canada, Harrison escaped while his ship was docked in Morocco. Making his way to Ireland, Harrison posed as a Catholic and joined the Free State Army. After he was discovered, he quickly crossed to Wales to treat the coal miners there for silicosis.^[4] In 1923 Harrison married his fourth wife, Eva Olwen Bowen in Cardiff, still without divorcing his three previous wives, and set off with her on an adventure in the Caribbean. It is thought that Harrison deserted her sometime in the mid-1920s.^[3] During the 1930s Harrison worked in 15 countries and dependencies across Latin America and the Middle East. For one year, he served as the physician for a guerrilla army fighting the Japanese, who were then engaged in the Second Sino-Japanese War with China.^[1][4][5] After 1938, Harrison traveled to Shanghai using borrowed funds from a medical school classmate in Jamaica and from his own brother in Ontario, and set up a private medical practice, assisting the Chinese Red Cross wherever possible.^[3]

Between 1941 and 1946, Harrison was the ship's doctor on board the Demodocus, a steam liner ferrying supplies to Allied forces across the Indian Ocean. After the war, Harrison wanted to assist the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), but had to falsify his records by subtracting seven years off his age to qualify for service. During this time, he served in China delivering much-needed supplies to a country devastated by the long Second Sino-Japanese War and once even saved the lives of 90 students by sheltering them from a Kuomintang officer. By donning an American army officer's uniform, Harrison was able to convince the Kuomintang officer to not check a barge which held the students hidden inside.^[1][3][5]

On December 4, 1946, Harrison set out from Shanghai with approximately 50 tonnes of supplies. On this train journey, he was to be accompanied by a Russian UNRRA worker and Chinese welfare representatives. Due to repeated Kuomintang inspections, the train journey constantly suffered from delays. The first such delay occurred at Nanjing and lasted four days; the second such delay, at Xuzhou, was of equal duration. At one station, the medical supplies were unhooked from the train's engine car and left on a bleak plain. The two UNRRA workers did not have clean water to drink and were forced to boil ditch water which was polluted with human waste. To add to the dire situation, Harrison's blanket and shoes were stolen, and due to the cold, he began to suffer from frostbite. Two weeks after Harrison left Shanghai, his train was permitted to move again, but there were problems still ahead. At each one of the 20 stations en route to Kaifeng, the train was delayed for up to three hours. Upon arrival at Kaifeng, the journey had to be completed by truck and ox cart. After completing one delivery, he returned to Kaifeng to pick up a second load, but could not continue past the Zhangqiu branch of the receiving hospital.^[2] Harrison died of exposure on January 10, 1947, near Kaifeng in China, aged 66.^[3][4][5]

By the end of his life, Tillson Harrison could speak no less than six different languages, had participated in seven wars and, although this was not discovered for several years after his death, was married to four women at the same time.^[1][3]

While he is virtually unknown in Canada, Harrison is widely honored in China. A statue in his likeness stands tall in Shanghai, his burial site at an Anglican compound in Kaifeng is home to the Dr. Tillson Harrison Memorial School, and the Harrison International Peace Hospital in Hengshui treats approximately 800 outpatients every day.^[1][8] The town of Tillsonburg, Ontario (named for Harrison's great-grandfather) maintains a lasting relationship with the hospital, which was renamed as such from the previous name of Handan International Peace Hospital in 1947.^[2][9] In 1988, the Prime Minister of Canada, Brian Mulroney, sent a commemorative letter to the Chinese ambassador to mark the centenary of Harrison's birth. However at that time it was not made clear that Harrison had falsified his age when enlisting in the UNRRA, and the celebrations took place seven years after the actual centenary.^[4] The same year, Harrison's remains were re-interred in a large tomb in a public ceremony, which many Canadians were invited to attend.^[2]

According to Harrison's daughter, Rosalind, several decades after her father's death, film producers George Lucas and Steven Spielberg contacted her, and in a series of interviews, Rosalind provided an account of her father's illustrious life. This, she claims, became the inspiration for the highly successful Indiana Jones film series.^[1] In recent times, Harrison was the subject of a five-part CBC Radio Morningside dramatization of his life, written by Antanas Sileika.^[10]