EDITOR'S COLUMN
“The World Needs More Canada” - Bono
Martin McKneally
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This last column gives me the
opportunity to say thanks to all I
have worked with, interviewed,
and written about these last 15
years. I’ll start with Richard
Reznick, who asked me to give
the Surgery Newsletter a personal,
familial rather than archival
feel. “What are they doing
down there in the Department,
and what are these people like?”
That’s the style we’ve tried for. I knew we were close
when Sylvia Perry described the Spotlight “like a small
town newspaper that everybody reads”.
So, here is some family news. After 27 years in
Toronto, and now well into my 9th decade, Deborah and
I have recently become aware that we need to be closer
to our family. We will be the 14th and 15th members
of the family circle to move into the Boston area, with
6 more American offspring visiting regularly. We are
renovating a century old house on the same street, just 2
blocks from our children and grandchildren. There will
be plenty of room to welcome Toronto visitors.
I am planning a seminar in Surgical Ethics with colleagues
at Harvard’s Center for Bioethics – further proof
that I haven’t yet mastered “the art of retirement” (a title
Ron Levine suggested for a final column). My excuse is
that the opportunity to meet with younger colleagues,
as I have throughout our Department of Surgery, and
to learn from them about leading edge thinking, techniques,
and controversies, has been a fountain of youthful
ideas and experience that prevents hardening of the
attitudes, and continually rewires aging synapses.
I encourage maturing surgeons to try it. Volunteer
to help the next editor, as a reporter, or associate editor.
Enroll in the MHSc in Bioethics and teach - so that each
of the divisions can have a Mark Bernstein or a Karen
Devon or a Mark Camp, stimulating members and
trainees to engage in thoughtful discourse about how the
specialty should think about the complex issues we are
encountering with increasing frequency.
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Martin and Deborah McKneally at Scaramouche with the Spotlight book
New York Times columnist Tom Freidman reminds
us in his stimulating recent book “Thank You for Being
Late” of the disequilibrating forces of technology, globalism,
and climate change that are accelerating the
transformation of everything - from the way we hail a
taxi to the world economy to the weather in the Arctic
and the Gulf of Mexico. Similarly, costly technological
changes in the OR, waiting lists that deprive patients of
timely care, and economic segmentation of society are
forces disequilibrating surgery. Time-bankrupted daily
schedules pre-empt reflective discussion and planning
for thoughtful action. Jim Rutka‘s introduction of the
Balfour Lectures in Surgical Ethics and Karen Devon`s
establishment of the Humanism in Surgery Lectures at
Women’s College Hospital and the Ethics M & M in
General Surgery are encouraging signs of our progress.
The altruism of the global surgery initiative, including
efforts to advance surgical care for indigenous and homeless
Canadians, provides an opportunity for reflection as
well as action.
I’ll close with thanks to Jim Rutka, John Wedge, Richard
Reznick, Bernie Langer, Bryce Taylor, Shaf Keshavjee and
all of my colleagues for their guidance. Special thanks to
Jim for his friendship and a parting gift illustrated nearby -
a 10-pound bound volume of 15 years of Spotlights.
Thanks to Alina, Julie, Nancy, Sylvia, Stephanie, Val,
Tess, Joanna, and all of the Surgery Department staff. “A fist
bump to all” and to our new editor, soon to be inducted by
Jim Rutka. I will send occasional notes from Boston, and
return from time to time for thesis meetings and celebrations,
to keep me attached to my Toronto roots, refreshed
for my mission to “Bring the world more Canada”.
M.M.
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