Accession UAA-2016-022 - UAA-2016-022

George Harrison Turner was a doctor and amateur botanist from Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta. Born in Baie Verte, New Brunswick, on June 28th, 1877, he was the sixth of eleven children born to Barker and Hannah "Annie" Turner. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Mount Allison University in 1899, and an MD CM degree from the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University in 1903.
He moved to Fort Saskatchewan in 1905 to be a general practitioner, the same year that CNR completed a rail line to the town. As part of his medical practice, he also made house calls to the nearby communities of Lamont and Bruderheim. In 1906 he married Florence Mary Yould, with whom he had two daughters, Anne (b. 1911) and Isabel Constance (b. 1913). He served as the first official doctor at the provincial jail built in Fort Saskatchewan in 1915. During his tenure as doctor at Fort Saskatchewan, he worked through a typhoid outbreak, railroad construction casualties, and the influenza outbreak of 1918-1920. With his eyesight failing, he retired from full-time practice in 1928, but carried on a limited practice until 1967.
Following Turner’s retirement from medicine, he turned his attention to botany. Turner collected botany specimens extensively throughout central Alberta, and regularly corresponded with botanists from across Alberta and North America. He published three articles in the Canadian Field-Naturalist: “Alpine plants in the Pigeon Lake district of Alberta” (1947), “Plants of the Edmonton district of the Province of Alberta” (1949), and “Salix petiolaris in the Edmonton district” (1949). Turner also co-authored the article “Bryophytes from the Edmonton region, Alberta” (1961) in the Canadian Journal of Botany with E. H. Moss. Turner donated his collection of approximately 12,000 specimens in Alberta herbararia to the University of Alberta and the University of Calgary.