Michael Bliss

McGill University has always aspired to foster healthcare complexes second to none in North America. It was not surprising in the late 1920s that McGill should reach south to hire Wilder Penfield, a very promising young American brain surgeon, in the hope that he would make McGill and Montreal a leader in one of medicine’s most remarkable new…

Brain surgery still vies with rocket science in our popular imagery about difficult occupations. It does not take a brain surgeon or a rocket scientist to be a politician. Brain surgeons seem to be the triathletes and mountaineers of medicine. Retired writers can’t become brain surgeons. Retired brain surgeons often become writers. Thomas Morley, retired head of neurosurgery at the former Toronto General Hospital (now part of the absurdly named University Health…

Canada plays in the major league of biomedical research. Our lead funding agency, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, spends just over a billion dollars annually, supporting the projects of upwards of 9,000 researchers across the country. Various other federal bodies, provincial research institutes, private foundations, hospitals, universities and other organizations spend perhaps another billion. The major medical school and hospital complexes in…

“That Canada, a country which prides itself on its support for the United Nations … no longer remembers that one of its own became the first director general of one of the UN’s most important agencies is a national disgrace.” Thus John Farley, a veteran historian of science and medicine at Dalhousie University, justifies his book-length account of…