Alfred Waddell

Alfred Ernest Waddell (25 August 1896 – 20 March 1953) was a Trinidadian physician and civil rights activist who is known for treating Viola Desmond's injuries following her 1946 arrest for sitting in a whites-only section of a cinema in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Early life and career Born in 1896 in Tunapuna, Trinidad and Tobago (then a colony of the British West Indies), Waddell moved to Harlem, New York, with his wife in 1923 and studied at Columbia University; he aspired to practise medicine in Trinidad, which meant he needed a medical degree from the British Commonwealth. He then moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and became one of the first Black physicians to graduate from Dalhousie University in 1933. He was one of the only physicians who provided house calls to the Black Nova Scotian communities of Africville, Beechville, Hammonds Plains, and Preston; he usually did this by borrowing cars from people and many patients could only pay him with chickens and eggs.