(fl. 1870s) physician. The Rev. John King gives a troubling account of the life and death of Wright. King says that he “called himself Dr. Wright a M.D.,” which suggests that King was not convinced that he was either a degree-holding physician or living under his own name. Dr Wright came to Notfield, GC, in the spring of 1872, from the United States. “He was a Scotchman from Edinburgh and had studied at its University, According to his own account he had been at Sea, and crossed the ocean many times, as Doctor on board Ship.” Dr Wright spent his first few days at Notfield in drinking. Thereafter, his evident skill in treating patients began to get him a practice, and King thought that he would have thrived, except that “his evil habit had Such a powerful hold of him that he again fell, and acted worse than at first, so that with drinking, eating opium, want of food, and exposure to the night air he fell into ill health from which he never recovered, But died of a Consumption of the Lungs in the house of a man of the name of Craig who kindly took him in when he was homeless.” John King, who visited him on his death bed, gave Wright’s age as thirty, and said that he “Seemed to have Come of respectable People” but had become a “wanderer.” He was buried in the Notfield cemetery, in the 17th Concession of Indian Lands (now the Maxville Cemetery).
This life of Wright is constructed wholly from the passage in the MS journal of the Rev. John King, Canadian Baptist Archives, McMaster University (QF, with punctuation and capitalization here as in original). No other notice of Dr Wright has been discovered.