In recognition for his work on behalf of students and the community he was awarded the "Gold 'D' by his fellow students as well as a study grant for a research health project in the Canadian Arctic examining the health status of First-nations' children and adults.7 This latter award was to further influence his choice of a rural general practice. After receiving his medical degree, Stewart began practice in a northern coastal fishing village on his home island of Cape Breton. In one of the most isolated rural practices in the province he found himself not only a solo-practice family physician, but also serving as "dentist" ("tooth-hauler" in the parlance of patients), county coroner, vet, "physician to sick mariners" and church organist. During those years he focused on improving physicians' home visits in collaboration with the local Public Health Nurse. Determined as well to improve the transport and care of patients referred to regional and provincial hospitals from the relatively remote fishing communities in the north highlands, as an interim measure he outfitted his jeep as an ambulance until a proper vehicle was available. To supplement his focus on emergency care, first-aid/CPR courses were offered to residents of the area, and swimming classes were organised after the young physician, with a growing appreciation of preventive medicine, learned that almost all adults and many of the children could not swim, despite their almost daily and intimate relationship with the sea. Having attended, as "county coroner," five drownings in this first several months of practice,8,9 he felt that this was a major public health problem and instituted a community-based "learn-to-swim" program the following summer. House calls by physicians in the region were a basic staple of Family Practice in the north highlands, and were expected day and night, and without regard for the weather. Returning from a midnight house call during an April blizzard in his second year of his practice, the itinerant physician suffered a head injury following a probable encounter with a moose and was transported in a newly acquired ambulance to the neurosurgical unit in the provincial capital of Halifax.10 He returned to practice after rehabilitation, although not completely recovered from a speech defect and right-sided paralysis.11  After several years based in the Neil's Harbour, he applied for, and was chosen over sixty other candidates, for the last available position in the first-ever academic (University of Southern California) department training specialists in emergency medicine at the Los Angeles County/University of Southern California (LAC/USC) Medical Centre.12 He set off from the north highlands of Nova Scotia in his Volvo station wagon packed with every scrap he owned and six days later was tentatively navigating US Interstate 10 into Los Angeles searching for the monolithic concrete building, the exterior of which was familiar to the millions of daytime soap-viewers of "General Hospital," Los Angeles County/USC Medical Centre.