WENDELL MACLEOD ENJOYED reminding people that the year of his birth coincided with the start of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. His knowledge of this relatively obscure fact and its relation to his existence highlights a facet of his idiosyncratic approach to human experience. The date resonates as a milestone in history, for it marked the opening salvo in the almost ceaseless conflict that characterized the twentieth century. Macleod’s fascination with contemporary events and his sensitivity to their impact on ordinary people began early and continued throughout the course of a life that mirrored the momentous events of the century....

WENDELL MACLEOD was the first of four sons born to the Reverend B. Macleod and Helena Brodie Macleod in Kingsbury in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. Both John and Helena came from rural backgrounds: John was born and raised on Prince Edward Island, where was the language spoken in the home, and Helena was raised on farm near the Upper Lachine Road on the outskirts of Montreal.

John Macleod started out as a potato farmer and a schoolteacher before enrolling at McGill University in Montreal to study arts and theology. He took the gold medal in philosophy and went on...

HAVING SPENT TWO YEARS in St Louis, with visits to hospitals in Chicago, Boston, and New Haven, Macleod returned to Montreal in October 1934 , planning to establish a practice in internal medicine and work in gastroenterology. In 1935 he was appointed a clinical assistant in medicine at the Royal Victoria Hospital and invited to join a group of physicians working out of 1390 Sherbrooke Street West. They included Dr Brow, Dr Miller, and Dr Tidmarsh. They were not a real group but rather private practitioners who shared the same premises and divided the costs. When Tidmarsh left for a...

BY 1940 IT WAS APPARENT that Europe was falling apart. In May, Hitler’s invasion of the low countries persuaded Macleod “to change from the posture of a naïve pacifist.” He joined the 5th Field Ambulance and spent two weeks at Mount Bruno carrying out World War I training exercises. He soon realized their futility in the face of modern warfare.

In February 1941 at the Royal Victoria Hospital he encountered an old friend, Donald R. Webster, surgeon commander and principal medical officer (PMO) of the Naval Shore Establishment at Halifax. From Webster he learned of the need for medical officers...

MACLEOD AND HIS FAMILY arrived in Winnipeg on 22 November 1945. “The temperature was 10 degrees,” he wrote. “Had supper with Dr. Lebbeter and Dr. Thor[lakson] at the Manitoba Club. We reviewed the clinic building and were flabbergasted by its modernity, its equipment and its obvious business-like organization.”¹

The Macleods took up their positions at the clinic, Jessie with the neuropsychiatrist Gilbert Adamson. The remainder of the year and much of 1946 were occupied with finding housing, establishing a presence at the clinic, getting started in practice, and beginning to take some leadership in organizing a “scientific committee” for the...

THE UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN was founded in 1907, and a College of Medicine was an integral part of the early plans of its first president, Walter C. Murray. Murray believed that the university should not an ivory tower but a practical resource to improve the well-being of the people of Saskatchewan. A medical school that would provide trained doctors and medical services for Saskatchewan would be a prime resource.

By 1926 Saskatchewan had weathered the postwar depression, its population had grown, the university had expanded, and its student population doubled. It was in this buoyant economic atmosphere that a two-year...

IN LEAVING SASKATCHEWAN, Macleod had to make a choice between contending opportunities. He had been invited to consider the deanship at the American University of Beirut and the position of executive secretary of the newly reorganized Association of Canadian Medical Colleges (ACMC). He took counsel with friends, and considered the potential effects of any decision on his family. Despite an invitation to visit Beirut, he declined the offer and opted for the ACMC job.

He had in fact been appointed to the position on 15 June 1961, but it was not secure. The ACMC had existed for twenty years as...

AFTER SANDY ROBERTSON left the University of Saskatchewan in 1962 to join the Milbank Memorial Fund in New York, he invited Macleod to become a member of Milbank’s Technical Board to help establish a fellowship training program in the health sciences.¹ Candidates, principally from South America and the West Indies, would obtain five years’ support from the Milbank Faculty Fellowship Program at $8,000 year to study in established centres. In the period between 1963 and 1970, forty-five fellowships were awarded. It was a unique program that greatly strengthened the academic base of medicine in South and Central America and the...

FOR THE FIRST TIME in his adult life, at the age of sixty-seven, Macleod was not regularly employed. Following his Haiti experience he continued on a number of educational and advisory jobs, including studies on health progress in Cuba and China and on immigration and health, as well as a variety of teaching assignments.

He took on the job of formally re-evaluating the functions of the Centretown Community Resource Centre (CCRC) for the federally funded Community Health Centre Study – the “Hastings Commission.”

Founded in 1969 as the Ottawa Street Clinic, originally located in the YMCA, the CCRC’s mandate was to...

MACLEOD’S EFFORTS IN PUTTING Norman Bethune “on the map” by bringing his achievements to public attention played a large part in Canada’s eventual recognition of the Bethune legacy. His work with the Bethune Memorial Committee, his visits to China, his role in organizing the 1979 conference on Bethune at McGill University, and the subsequent publication ofNorman Bethune: His Times and His Legacyall helped to demonstrate Bethune’s impact on Chinese and Canadian international and medical relations.

The two men first met at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal in 1931 before Bethune left for St Louis. After his return...

MACLEOD MET HELEN MUSSALLEM shortly after his arrival in Ottawa in 1962. They were both active in national medical bodies, he with the AGMC and she with the Canadian Nurses Association. Macleod first refers to her in his diary on 19 February 1965: “Te deum— MacFarlane Report emerges from Queen’s Printer. Jubilant lunch with Bernard Blishen and Helen Mussallem.”¹

Born in British Columbia, Helen was the daughter of Christian Lebanese immigrants. Her father was a fiercely independent man who moved from Eastern Canada to Winnipeg and then to the West Coast in an effort to establish himself as an entrepreneur....

IN FEBRUARY 1974 Hazen Sise died suddenly of a pulmonary embolus resulting from thrombophlebitis. He left behind his wife, Jolanta (“Jola”), and a young son, Hazen (“Hadie”). Macleod wrote that he was “shocked by the tragedy. Hazen had so much yet left to do.”¹

Jola and Macleod had met in Ottawa in 1972, and “then, of course, we went to China in 1973.” Alert to the family’s distress, Macleod began to spend a great deal of time with Jola. Helen Mussallem considered his attention excessive.²

Jola felt guilty about her attitude towards her husband’s illness and death: “I had given...

EVEN A CURSORY READING of the preceding pages on the professional life of Wendell Macleod confirms the infinite variety of experiences that made up that life. The brief essay that follows tries to convey some sense of the man himself – the person perceived not only by his friends but also his detractors. To everyone, friend or enemy, he was a dynamic presence. For every unwavering disciple, an equally fervent opponent denounced his social agenda as dangerous, even radical. But such attacks only strengthened his faith in his own beliefs and his determination to defend them.

At its core Macleod’s philosophy...