Welcome New Surgical Residents

A fantastic cohort of new residents has beaten the competition to enter the Gallie Program in July 2009. They
have diverse and interesting backgrounds.

The Department of Surgery continues to grow with expansion of the number of trainees in many of the surgical specialties. The expertise and enthusiasm of their teachers and resident colleagues promise that our residents will be the best taught ever.

Forty-Five residents have entered the department - 33 male and 12 female. Thirty-four have come through the CaRMS

match and are Canadian Medical School graduates. Ten have come through the IMG match and include Canadians who have studied abroad and are returning to Canada for their surgical training as well as Permanent Residents who have obtained their MD in other countries and will be practicing in Ontario. One is a "visa trainee," who will return to their home country following training. What a great gift this diverse group of bright young minds brings to our department. Welcome new residents!

Ronald H. Levine, MD
Director, Postgraduate Surgical Education
Department of Surgery

From "Norman Bethune", by Adrienne Clarkson
Penguin Canada, 2009, pp39-41.

Right after high school, Bethune, who loved sports and wasn't particularly interested in things intellectual, went to work for a year in a lumber camp in Algoma, in northern Ontario. It consolidated his love for the woods. Nature and the Canadian Shield represented to him not simply pleasant holidays, they were a fact of his life; he was born close to the wilderness and he could contend with it. A logging camp was nevertheless a tough place to live. He was a minister's son, and for the first time he learned what it was like to live day to day working in very dangerous circumstances - logging in deep snow, dragging logs to the river where they would form a huge boom, sawing the trees into lengths, rolling on logs, and giving orders in difficult situations to teams of immigrant men who did not speak English.

He took various jobs, interrupting his education for up to a year at a time. He taught for six months in a oneroom school in the village of Edgeley, near Toronto, and earned $269, which was quite a sum of money. This, together with the logging money, financed his medical studies at the University of Toronto. Then he went to work in camps with a specific purpose: Bethune taught his fellow workers reading and writing in the evenings as a member of Frontier College. Alfred Fitzpatrick had founded the movement in 1899.... 'To many of the foreigners, the labourer-teacher is a new type of Canadian - clean in life and lip, yet straightforward and doing a man's work alongside them,' wrote Fitzpatrick. 'He stands for staunch Canadianism and British institutions, and teaches by example and daily wear and tear. He is measured by his worth, not his theory. Quietly and unassumedly, he is a molder of Canadianism.'

For more, see Summer 2009 article on Adrienne Clarkson's book.