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The recent E. coli-contaminated water scandal in Walkerton, Ont., serves as a jolting reminder of what Canadian medicine achieved over the past century and what it now risks losing -- our hard won international reputation as a leader in public health and preventive medicine.
That singular accomplishment was due in part to the vision of my grandfather, Dr. John Gerald FitzGerald, the founder of the Connaught Laboratories in 1914 and the University of Toronto school of hygiene in 1925. His story is a highly dramatic one, yet still largely unknown to most Canadians.
An intense, red-haired man driven by a passionate ambition. Gerry FitzGerald was born in 1882 in Drayton. Ont., a village north of Kitchener. The grandson of Irish Protestant immigrants, he entered medical school at the University of Toronto at age 16 and graduated at 20. the youngest in his class. Initially drawn to psychiatry, he changed direction at age 25, perhaps feeling he could accomplish far more in the emerging fields of bacteriology and public health.
In the summer of 1910, Dr. FitzGerald worked at the Pasteur Institute at its branches in Paris and in Brussels, learning how to make rabies, diphtheria and smallpox vaccines, and anti-toxins. Over the next three years, he kept up a blistering pace, travelling the world studying pathology and bacteriology at the University of Freiburg in Germany, the Lister Institute in London, the New York City department of health and the University of California at Berkeley.
In 1913, armed with...