Of the important contributions made by Wilbert Keon, a gifted medical scientist, administrator, teacher, and heart surgeon, the most significant is the creation of the world’s finest cardiac institute. Built on broad health care principles, the Heart Institute (not the world’s largest) is unique in its state of the art concept of treating the whole patient and the family. Starting with prevention, a dedicated team specializes in such areas as preoperative psychosocial assessment, exemplary medical care, skilled surgery, with psychotherapy, dietetics, physiology and a rehabilitation program. It also offers a wide range of services from physical and vocational activity to spousal support groups. Since the early 1990s, multidisciplinary clinics have been created for the control of major risk factors including hypertension, hyperlipidaemia and stress.

The University of Ottawa Heart Institute today is known for its clinical and surgical expertise. It has developed an excellent teaching program for cardiovascular surgery and has strategically placed graduates worldwide. It has also continued its research into devices to assist a failing circulation, parallel arts and cardiac transplantation. Its founder, Dr. Keon, the first Canadian surgeon to implant a total artificial heart as a bridge to a homograft transplant, was a medical pioneer of the now-accepted treatment of emergency revascularization in acute heart attacks. Dr. Keon’s current research involves a fifteen-member team perfecting a truly implantable artificial heart.

Of course, the Heart Institute is primarily designed to care for patients with heart disease and with Donald Beanlands, head of the medical section and Wilbert Keon in charge of surgery, this priority is respected. There is a special wing for experimental and clinical research. 

Dr. Wilbert Joseph Keon operates each year on the hearts of nearly 300 patients. Known as "the consummate surgeon "by his peers, this pioneering heart surgeon in involved in life and death decisions daily. Esteemed by dedicated cardiac team of specialists, this exceptional doctor has made Ottawa's honoured Heart Institute Internationally famous and globally respected.[Photo, courtesy Dr. Wilfred G. Bigelow via the University of Ottawa Heart Istititute, Ottawa Civic Hospital]

Some years ago, the University of Hamburg, a leading German cardiovascular centre, sent a fact-finding team to Dr. Keon to study the Heart Institute with plans for a similar one in Hamburg. The team included financial and architectural experts. After five days of thorough browsing, they held a meeting with Keon. He walked in, sat down, looked at the group and said, “Well, I guess you gentlemen know more about the Institute than I do.” Not exactly an austere Herr Direktor.

When challenged regarding the cost of the Heart Institute’s hi-tech procedures, Dr. Keon makes no apologies. “I haven’t the slightest problem rationalizing what we do here considering the demonstrable benefits.”

In setting up the Institute’s research wing, Dr. Keon was able to attract Dr. Adolpho de Bold to be Director. Dr. de Bold’s discovery of cardio-natrin, a natural diuretic produced by heart muscle, had attracted worldwide attention.

In acknowledgement of the Institute’s excellence in clinical work as well as of its superb research, the Institute received, in 1994/95, $2.6 million in peer-reviewed grants, and $6.5 million in research contracts jointly with a well-known transplant centre in the United States. This total of $9.1 million in 1994/95 for use by the Institute is remarkable considering the relatively small specialized staff. The Institute will likely be the first to use an implantable artificial heart – the goal of many University centres worldwide.

The creator of Ottawa’s Heart Institute was born in Sheenboro, Quebec, in 1935, the youngest in a family of 13 and it was his good fortune that he had a most remarkable widowed mother. She launched all her children into successful careers. Wilbert Keon was not obsessed at an early age with becoming a heart surgeon. As a late teenager he had plans to be a hockey player until his mother intervened, without consultation, sending him to college in preparation for medicine. He received his medical degree in Ottawa, surgical training at McGill, cardiovascular surgical training at the University of Toronto and surgical research experience at Harvard. In 1969 he returned to Ottawa and, besides directing the newly formed Heart Institute, was appointed professor and chairman of the Department of Surgery, University of Ottawa, 1976 to 1991.
 

The pride of Canada's capital is the University of Ottawa Heart Institute at the Ottawa Civic Hospital. The Ottawa Citizen's salute to the Institue's founder warmly describes Dr. Keon's humanity outshining all his other accomplishments [Reproduced from The Ottawa Citizen, July 9, 1984]

The people of Ottawa are extremely proud of “their” Institute. And they adore its director/founder, Wilbert Keon. His qualities of humanity, humour, and special caring for the patient have become legendary and he is admired by both the professional and non-medical population of Ottawa. As an example of the community’s goodwill, $50 million has been raised for the Heart Institute. The first building, built in two phases, cost $17 million, $10 million of which Keon was primarily responsible for obtaining and $5 million came from the Progressive Conservative government of Ontario.

When the research wing was built for a further $17 million, Dr. Keon raised an additional $10 million, $5 million this time coming from the Liberal government. He played no favourites! In December 1991, in spite of contrary advice because of the recession, he personally sponsored a 24-hour telethon and raised $1.8 million! The Institute continues to raise over $2 million per year from the community for Research & Development.

Dr. Wilbert Keon has been honoured by the medical profession with numerous awards; by his church as a Knight of St. Gregory the Great, by Pope John Paul II, and as an Officer of the Order of Malta; by his province with the Order of Ontario; by his country as an Officer of the Order of Canada and by his appointment to the Senate of Canada. This latter appointment, a surprise to his colleagues, followed a long, late-evening phone call from Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, who emphasized the government’s need for someone of Keon’s calibre to contribute to a joint Senate-Commons health committee.

Wilbert Keon is a COMPLEAT surgeon. Fishermen will recognize this word, first used in 1653 by Izaac Walton. It indicates that there is nothing missing. Willie Keon has it all, including the association, love and devotion of his wife Anne and their three successful children.

What is most striking about Dr. Keon is his unstinting dedication to academic excellence and the improvement of health care of all Canadians. Throughout his career he has chosen to work for a modest salary as a full-time academic while returning several million dollars from his clinical earnings to the University and the Heart Institute for academic development. Through his leadership and humanity, this pre-eminent, world-famous doctor has produced a milieu where all clinicians at the Ottawa-based Heart Institute work under full-time arrangements in harmony with basic scientists.

Wilfred Bigelow