GRENFELL, SIR WILFRED THOMASON, K.C.M.G., M.D. (1865— ), British medical missionary, was born on Feb. 28, 1865 at Parkgate, Cheshire. He was educated at Marlborough and Oxford, where he took the degree of M.D., and studied medicine at the London Hospital under Sir Frederick Treves. At his suggestion Grenfell, in 1889, joined the Royal National Mis sion for Deep Sea Fishermen and for three years cruised with it in the North Sea as medical missionary. In 1892 he went to Labrador as first medical missionary and there did great work, building hospitals, establishing homes and missions for the in habitants, and organizing industrial schemes. Besides the work he did locally in Labrador and northern Newfoundland, cul minating in the opening by King George of the Seamen's insti tute at St. John's in 1912, Grenfell lectured in Canada, America and England in order to raise funds, and the mission expanded rapidly until, in 1912, its English, American and Canadian branches were united by the formation in New York of the International Grenfell Association, of which Grenfell became superintendent. During the early part of the World War he was attached as major to the Harvard Surgical Unit in France. He was a K.C.M.G. in 1927.
Grenfell's publications include: Vikings of Today (1895) ; The Harvest of the Sea (190) ; Labrador: the Country and its People (1909, re-issued 1913 and 1922 with additional chapters) ; Adrift on an Ice-Pan (191o) ; A Labrador Doctor (192o, abridged 1925) ; Northern Neighbours (1923) ; Religion in Everyday Life (1926).
See B. J. Mathews, Wilfred Grenfell, the Master Marine (1924) and F. L. Waldo, Grenfell: Knight-Errant of the North (Phila., 1924) .