Pine Solved

Treating ailments with a walk in the woods.

- Peter Kuitenbrouwer

In the early 1940s, while embroiled in the Second World War, the government of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King faced a PR problem back home: injured soldiers were being sent to a Toronto cash-register factory that had been hastily converted to house the wounded. Torch, a newspaper for veterans, heaped scorn on what it called the “chief orthopaedic military hospital in Canada.” It described “ramshackle, inflammable additions” and observed that the vets lacked adequate light or recreational areas. The Canadian government had asked the City of Toronto for land to erect a new facility. Milton Gregg, minister of veterans’ affairs, called for “rural surroundings (that) can have a beneficial effect upon morale.” In 1948, Mackenzie King opened Sunnybrook Hospital, then the largest hospital in Canada, on a forested plateau north of downtown. Sunnybrook’s principal architect, Hugh L. Allward, noted that “a clear-running stream adds charm to a broad valley available to patients and their friends.” The founders of Sunnybrook recognized something ancient and intuitive: the healing power of forests.