About a month after the death of Robert Baldwin, perhaps the most pivotal figure in Canada’s pre-Confederation evolution, his son and two other relatives opened the Toronto crypt where his body lay frozen in January 1859 and watched as a doctor sliced the abdomen of the corpse.
The incision was in keeping with Baldwin’s strict instructions, a new biography explains, to match the scar that his beloved and long-dead wife, Eliza, had carried after giving birth by caesarean section nearly a quarter of a century earlier. The difficult delivery of their son, Robert Jr., was ultimately the cause of Eliza’s death in January 1836.
The eccentricities of Great Men should not detract from their greatness.
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