October induction ceremony will coincide with official opening of Canadian Medical Hall of Fame

Canadian Medical Association Journal 1995; 153: 825-826

[résumé]

Abstract

Seven eminent Canadians will be honoured for outstanding and innovative contributions to medical science when they are inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame Oct. 5.

The 1995 inductees are Drs. Henry Barnett, Bruce Chown, Herbert Jasper, Charles Leblond, William Mustard, Robert Salter and Michael Smith. The induction ceremony and banquet, the first since the hall's inception and induction of 10 initial laureates last year, will be held at the Convention Centre in London, Ont. The events will coincide with the official opening of the hall.

The Canadian Medical Hall of Fame was the brainchild of Dr. Calvin Stiller, chief of multiorgan transplant services at London's University Hospital. Last year he told CMAJ (150; 2022--2024) that the idea developed after he was asked to give a talk on Canadian contributions to health care, only to find there was no readily available documentation.

"The more I thought about it, the more I realized that we can never attract young people into health care research, nor would the public buy into the importance of it, until we began to honour our own. I would like to see the day when a Canadian hero could just as easily be a Michael Smith [who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1993] as a Wayne Gretzky."

Although Smith's stature as a hero of science was never in doubt because of the Nobel Prize, his achievements and those of six others will now be publicly and permanently recognized in Canada when they are inducted into the Hall of Fame next month. Following are thumbnail sketches of the seven inductees:

• Dr. Henry Barnett, 1991 recipient of the CMA's F.N.G. Starr Award, is widely known for his research on stroke. He was the principal investigator in a number of collaborative multicentre clinical trials, including the first randomized trial to show that acetylsalicylic acid prevents stroke, and an international trial that showed a widely used surgical procedure, cerebral bypass surgery, had little value; its abandonment saved hundreds of millions of dollars in health care costs and spared many patients from risk. A graduate of the University of Toronto, where he specialized in neurology, Barnett was the founding chief, together with Dr. Charles Drake, of the Department of Clinical Neurological Sciences at University Hospital in London, and was president and scientific director of London's Robarts Research Institute from 1984 to 1992.
• Dr. Bruce Chown laid the foundation for the elimination of erythroblastosis fetalis in newborns. A 1922 graduate of the University of Manitoba, Chown studied at Columbia, Cornell and Johns Hopkins universities before returning to become pathologist at the Winnipeg Children's Hospital. There, from 1944 to 1975, he focused much energy on understanding and treating Rh disease, and set up a laboratory to manufacture Rh immune serum. Rh immunoglobulin was licensed in 1968 and the result has been the prevention of the vast majority of potential Rh disease in Canada and elsewhere. Chown, who was honoured by the CMA in 1969 with the F.N.G. Starr Award, was considered an exceptional scientist and an expert clinician, diagnostician and teacher.
• Dr. Herbert Jasper, a director of the Laboratories of Neurophysiology and Electroencephalography at the Montreal Neurological Institute and a close colleague of neurosurgeon Dr. Wilder Penfield, played a key role in the exploration of the brain's function in health and disease. Before coming to McGill in 1938, he and colleagues at Brown University in Rhode Island built high-gain amplifiers and oscillographs capable of recording electrical currents in the brain; he later used this electroencephalograph in Montreal to locate the sources of electrical seizures in brain disorders ranging from epilepsy to tumours and brain injuries. In 1994, he was awarded the F.N.G. Starr Award by the CMA.
• Dr. Charles Leblond has over the past half-century been responsible for developing a number of techniques that have advanced knowledge in anatomy. One of these, radioautography, made it possible to study cell function and development and observe dynamic biologic phenomena. He made particularly significant contributions to the understanding of iodine metabolism and the function and turnover of cells lining the interior wall of the intestines. He was director of the McGill University Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology from 1957 to 1974 and, at age 85, continues as a professor. He has published more than 300 papers covering a wide range of research.
• Dr. William Mustard, a 1937 graduate of the University of Toronto, pioneered the use of the heart-lung machine and cooling, thus expanding the scope of surgery for hereditary heart defects. An innovative surgeon, he was the first to use prosthetic glass tubes in wounded arteries and in the repair of congenital defects early in infancy. He devised an operation used worldwide today to correct an inborn defect in "blue babies." Mustard earned the MBE while with the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps during World War II, then went to New York to perfect his skills in orthopedic surgery. Returning to Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, he was head of orthopedic surgery from 1948 to 1964 and head of cardiovascular surgery from 1964 to 1976.
• Dr. Robert Salter, professor of orthopedic surgery, senior orthopedic surgeon and research project director at the Hospital for Sick Children, developed innovative orthopedic treatments over nearly 40 years. The University of Toronto graduate developed the "Salter operation" to treat dislocation of the hip in 1960. His recognition of the therapeutic effectiveness of continuous passive motion to the repair of cartilage injuries has received clinical application throughout the world. He was professor of surgery at the U of T, and from 1976--86 was professor and head of the Division of Orthopedic Surgery. He has written two editions of his textbook, Disorders of the Musculo-Skeletal System, and has published original research on many aspects of bone disease and repair.
• Michael Smith, PhD, was awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing site- directed mutagenesis, a genetic- engineering technique. This method of manipulating DNA segments has become a fundamental tool in biotechnology. Smith, who is director of the University of British Columbia biotechnology laboratory and former head of the network of Centres of Excellence in Protein Engineering, is a graduate of the University of Manchester. In addition to many other accolades, he was awarded the CMA's Medal of Honour in 1994.

The Canadian Medical Hall of Fame is sponsored by the MRC, the CMA, the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association of Canada and the Association of Canadian Medical Colleges.