for his induction into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame, april 12, 2018.
some background
Initially trained in urology, the talented surgeon/educator/researcher never thought much about death or the process of dying- he just assumed that as a doctor, he of course knew everything. But then he did something that would change his entire career trajectory: he volunteered to organize a book discussion at his church- and the book was Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s On Death and Dying. He soon learned how little he actually understood.
what happened next
The premise of the book propelled Dr Mount to study the experiences of terminally ill patients at his hospital- Montreal’s illustrious Royal Victoria Hospital. He discovered “that to die at the Royal Vic was a catastrophe”. In his typical forthright manner and with a calling to improve the care of patients, he visited Dame Cicely Saunders and St Christopher’s Hospice and saw what was possible. He returned to the Royal Vic and convinced his hospital to create a ward for the dying (while maintaining his urology practice). He named it the ‘palliative care ward’, because to palliate means to improve the quality of something. And the term palliative care was born. The ward remains a permanent fixture at the hospital even today.
Dr Mount eventually shifted to palliative care full time and he continues to teach and do research as the director of McGill University’s ‘whole-person care program’. (As a curmudgeonly aside, that a program dedicated to ‘whole person care’ is an entity, is a tell-tale sign of the current state of our highly technical and fractured practice of medicine, but I digress).
We all owe Dr Balfour a debt of gratitude and heartfelt congratulations.
read a recent interview
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