Obituaries / Obituaires - Canadian Bulletin of Medical History

Obituaries / Obituaires
In memoriam : Madame Yolande Bonenfant (1917-2008)
Madame Bonenfant est décédée à Québec le 9 décembre 2008.
En octobre 1973, Madame Bonenfant était au nombre des sept cosignataires de
la demande d’incorporation de la Société canadienne d’histoire de la médecine.
Trésorière de la société pendant 12 ans, soit jusqu’en 1985, elle fut ensuite élue
membre honoraire. En 1975-76, elle a fait partie du comité organisateur du Congrès de la Société internationale d’histoire de la médecine qui se tint à Québec
du 21 au 28 août 1976.
Madame Bonenfant a joué un rôle important au sein de plusieurs organismes humanitaires et culturels de la ville de Québec. Elle fut entre autres cofondatrice et présidente du premier conseil d’administration de la maison MichelSarrazin (1985 à 1990), un centre hospitalier privé, à but non lucratif, destiné aux
malades en phase terminale. Son nom figurait aussi au sein de plusieurs conseils
d’administration de la ville : Hôtel-Dieu du Sacré-Cœur, collège Mérici, musée
du Séminaire de Québec, et d’autres. Son implication sociale lui a valu plusieurs
distinctions. Elle fut notamment médaillée du lieutenant-gouverneur du
Québec, récipiendaire du prix Bénévolat-Canada (1986) et membre de l’Ordre
du Canada (avril 1993).
Elle avait fait ses études chez les Ursulines, puis à la Faculté des lettres de l’Université Laval. Elle était l’épouse de Jean-Charles Bonenfant (1912-1977) qui
fut bibliothécaire de la bibliothèque du Parlement du Québec et professeur à
l’Université Laval. Ils eurent quatre enfants.
Madame Bonenfant était une personne dévouée, efficace et qui savait susciter
l’enthousiasme autour d’elle. Avec son départ, c’est une page importante des
débuts de l’histoire de la Société canadienne d’histoire de la médecine qui se termine, les autres signataires du document de 1973 étant tous décédés.
JACQUES BERNIER
Charles Gordon Roland (January 25, 1933 Winnipeg – June 9, 2009
Burlington, Ontario)1
A personal reminiscense.
When I think of Chuck, I think of the Shakespearian sonnet “Shall I compare
thee to a summer’s day?”, for he was truly sunny, temperate, and fair. His life,
which he discussed in a series of interviews with Jackie Duffin and me in February, 2007 reads like a Canadian romance: return home at six weeks of age to a
burnt down log cabin on God’s Lake, Manitoba, riding two miles through the
snow to school with a dog team when he was eleven, a dream job as bellhop at
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the Chateau Lake Louise during the summers of 1950-53, calls to be a senior editor at the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in Chicago in 1964,
and to a faculty position at the prestigious Mayo Medical School in Rochester,
Minnesota in 1969, and finally a recall to Canada in 1977 to become McMaster
University’s first Hannah Professor of the History of Medicine: all this against
the backdrop of a love affair with Connie née Rankin that lasted—with one
20-year intermission—from 1952 to 2009. Let me highlight three important traits
that defined the man.
Chuck was a self-motivated, self-directed agent all his life. Perhaps it was
owing to his upbringing in a long series of isolated northern communities, or his
father’s perennial disability due to tuberculosis which forced the boy to take on
a man’s responsibilities at an early age, or perhaps it was just his pioneer genes.
While in high school, he held a continuous series of part-time jobs, and still
found time to edit the student yearbook, set-up a camera club, and write sports
columns for the Kenora Miner and News. As a pre-medical student in Toronto, he
was on the staff of the University of Toronto Medical Journal and presented a
paper to the student Osler Society; in medicine at the University of Manitoba, he
founded an Osler Society, spent two summers in the physiological laboratory
researching vascular function toward his BSc, and co-authored two clinical
studies published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ). While in
general practice in Grimsby, Ontario, he wrote abstracts, editorials, and articles
for the CMAJ; at JAMA he edited a constant stream of scientific articles, oversaw
the production of a special Canadian historical issue in 1967, and taught courses
in writing for medical students and physicians. At the Mayo Clinic he developed
courses ranging from family medicine to sex-education while chairing a Department of Medical Communications with a staff of over 100, and at McMaster he
created a unique program in medical history designed in the spirit of the Hamilton Faculty’s revolutionary educational philosophy, which he heartily shared. In
short, stamina and originality, enthusiasm and commitment were his professional hallmarks.
A second striking trait was Chuck’s cool objectivity with regard to himself
and the world around him, coupled with a great eagerness to learn and to
change. He recounted his most formative experiences in the interviews:
1) a historical faux pas in his Osler Society paper: “I was giving a paper on the
Rockefellers and medical research and such, and I was managing apparently to
get the Rockefeller Institute and the Rockefeller Foundation mixed up—and
somewhere in the middle of my talk, Dr. Wasteneys shouted out: ‘No, you’re
wrong.’ And he was right—I was wrong. And I don’t think I have ever been that
ill-prepared since.” (p. 21)
2) a scientific misjudgement at a seminar during his BSc training: “And I ended
up saying—So it looks to me like the paper proves it’s a useful drug. ‘OK’ he
[Dr. Joe Doupe] said: ‘Roland, how many patients were there?’ Um, 17, I think.
He said: ‘Now, 17 patients and how many got the drug . . .?’ You know where
I’m going. I knew absolutely nothing and the drug did nothing, at least there
was no proof. That was a very salutary experience.” (p. 27)
3) a decisive moment along his career path leading from clinical medicine to the
history of medicine: “At any rate, in one letter I wrote to Dr. H. E. MacDermot,
I said in a fit of pique, I guess, that I was fed up with my medical life in Grimsby
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and that nobody there cared about anything that I cared about, aside from the
day-to-day practice of medicine. No one cared about history and no one cared
about scholarship . . . . In his terse reply, he said: ‘Don’t feel sorry for yourself,
do something about it; for example the CMAJ is located in Toronto, and as a former editor I know that volunteers are welcomed with open arms . . . .’ So I
wrote to the editor and got a nice letter back.” (p. 29)
This cool objectivity may well have been a contributing factor to Chuck’s even
temper: during a friendship that extended over more than 30 years, I never
once saw him angry: critical, bitingly witty, sardonic, sad—yes; but angry—no.
The third characteristic was Chuck’s great ability as a mentor and a teacher.
When we met in London, Ontario in 1976, we discovered that we were both
working independently to update Dr. MacDermot’s 1934 A Bibliography of Canadian Medical Periodicals, with Annotations. I had begun the project because I felt
that as a Hannah Professor I should do something Canadian, and because I
liked bibliography; I knew little about Canadian medical history, and had published one book review and one article in my life. Chuck, already a leader in the
field and very widely published, treated me as an equal and suggested a collaboration; Connie gave us her blessing: “You boys will get this thing done.” So
we drew a line through Kingston: I got everything in Kingston and to the east,
Chuck got everything to the west. Three years later when we were writing the
preface to the volume, one of us wrote a rough draft, the other revised it, and we
continued to pass revisions back and forth until we were both happy; then we
flipped a coin to decide who would be first author. And I am sure that many
other beginning scholars, including Jackie Duffin, who was Chuck’s Associate
Editor of the CBMH from 1987 to 1989, could tell similar stories. Chuck encouraged without patronizing, he criticized without blaming, he taught without
talking down.
I hope this short account will have suggested to those who never had the
good fortune to know Chuck a little of what he was like, and recalled to those of
you who knew him some of your own happy experiences with him. His place
will not soon be filled.
PAUL POTTER
NOTE
1 Readers are referred to obituaries by Peter Warren on the CMAJ website, 16 June
2009, and by Gay Abbate in the Globe and Mail, 27 June 2009, p. S14. Transcripts of
the Roland interviews mentioned below are available in the libraries of Queen’s
University, McMaster University, the University of Western Ontario, the University
of Manitoba, and the archives of the Canadian Society for the History of Medicine.