Farewell to a columnist
CMAJ 1997;156:1523
Dr. Douglas Waugh, who had written more than 120 columns for CMAJ since 1986, died Apr. 18, 1997, after a long battle with lung disease. He was 79.
He had resigned from writing his Vista column earlier in the year. "I guess you could say the well is dry," he said then. "I've run out of ideas." Shortly before his death, CMAJ editors visited his Ottawa home to present a Certificate of Appreciation for his work.
His column began appearing monthly in 1986, and during the next 10 years he wrote about topics both light and weighty, from the use of birth-control pills to stimulate plant growth to the future of his specialty, pathology.
He will be remembered best for columns that went where few writers dared venture, for Doug Waugh was never afraid to say what he thought and why he thought it. In one of his most moving pieces he discussed the prejudices rampant in his youth, including the views of his parents.
Then he wrote this: "Oh, times have indeed changed. We have learned to be subtle in concealing our biases. Political action based on them has become cleverly oblique, couched in politically correct language. And when we don't hire someone it's not, heaven forbid, because they're of a different colour or ethnic background. It's because they don't have 'Canadian experience.' "
Sometimes, he concluded, "I think back to those days in Winnipeg and to how little things have really changed."
More recently, he discussed the role of Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the American physician involved in many assisted suicides -- he considered him a hero -- as well as euthanasia, health care rationing and physician morale.
Waugh, who graduated from McGill in 1942, spent his early professional years in the army before being trained in pathology. Like so many physicians of that era, military experience had a major impact on his life. He returned to the topic in a column marking the 50th anniversary of VE-Day in May 1995, when he recalled spending May 8, 1945, in a little town in Germany. He had many memories from those times, he reported, but when VE-Day rolls around each year "I mostly remember other things . . . and thousands of young Canadians who never made it home with me."
After the war he practised pathology and then moved into the administrative field, first as dean of medicine at Queen's University and then as executive director of the Association of Canadian Medical Colleges. He was a senior member of the CMA, emeritus member of the Canadian Association of Pathologists and past president of the National Cancer Institute of Canada. He is survived by his wife, Sheila, and 3 brothers.
Dr. Bruce Squires, CMAJ's editor-in-chief when most of Waugh's columns appeared, said his "vast experience" in different aspects of medicine made the columns possible. "The column also gave him the freedom to look at topics in entirely different ways."
Speaking to mourners during the Apr. 22 funeral service in Ottawa, Squires said that even though he "didn't always agree with the sentiments Doug expressed in his columns, I was awed by his uncanny ability to cut through today's self-righteous political correctness to reveal ourselves as we really are."
Squires concluded that many columns "struck chords that were far deeper than [readers] necessarily wanted to go. That's probably why they caused such furore. Doug called himself a curmudgeon, but I rather think that, true to his training as a pathologist, identifying the absolute truths was his real goal. Thank you, Doug."
As the editor who handled his columns, I'm going to miss working with a lively and daring writer who took me down many new roads. CMAJ readers will miss him too. -- Patrick Sullivan, News and Features Editor
On Apr. 9, 1997, Dr. Douglas Waugh (second left) received a Certificate of Appreciation from Dr. Bruce Squires, CMAJ's former editor-in-chief, as news and features editor Patrick Sullivan (left) and current editor-in-chief Dr. John Hoey looked on.
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