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Dr. O. Harold Warwick was born in Saint John, New Brunswick in 1915 and died in London, Ontario in 2009. The “O” in his name stood for Orlando, though he was referred to as “Harold”. In 1942 he married Barbara Gzowski with whom he had four children—two sons and two daughters.

He graduated with a B.A. from Mount Alison University in 1936, followed by a B.A. in Physiology from Oxford University in England in 1938 and his M.D. from McGill University in Montreal in 1940. Between 1941 and 1945 he was a Squadron Leader with the RCAF overseas. When he returned to civilian life in 1945 he began his post-graduate medical training in Internal Medicine at McGill University in Montreal and then in London, England as a Nuffield Scholar.

By 1947, Dr. Warwick was back in Montreal as teaching staff at McGill University and a physician in the Department of Medicine at Royal Victoria Hospital. From 1948 to 1961 he was teaching staff in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto. During this time he was the first joint Executive Director of the National Cancer Institute of Canada and the Canadian Cancer Society (1948-1955). He was also a physician at Toronto General Hospital (1948-1958). By 1955 his work at Toronto General Hospital was as a full-time physician at the Ontario Institute of Radiotherapy. When Princess Margaret Hospital opened in 1958 he became its Chief Physician (1958-1961). In 1961 he moved back to London, Ontario as Dean and Professor of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Western Ontario (1961-1965) before becoming Vice-President of the Health Sciences (1965-1971). From 1972-1980 he was a physician at Victoria Hospital and London Regional Cancer Clinic. He retired in 1980.

Dr. Warwick was a pioneering researcher in cancer control and treatment:
<blockquote>During his years at the Toronto General, the Radiotherapy Institute and the Princess Margaret Hospital, Warwick treated and studied hundreds of patients with cancer, spoke and wrote about treatment with hormones and chemotherapy agents, and published a number of papers on clinical drug trials. The most important of these established the value of the vinca alkaloid, vinblastine sulphate, particularly in patients with Hodgkin's disease. As a complete practitioner of cancer medicine Warwick had been a "medical oncologist", undoubtedly the first in Canada, for many years before the specialty was accepted and named.¹</blockquote>

Dr. Warwick became a Member of the Order of Canada in 1990.

1. Dr. Don Cowan. Quoted in Obituary of O. Harold Warwick. http://www.inmemoriam.ca/view-announcement-195264-o.-harold-warwick.html. Accessed: July 18, 2011.

Dr. Richard T. Weaver, MB, FACS, FRCSC, was born in North Western Canada in 1898 and raised by missionary parents in a remote part of Manitoba. He became fluent in Cree, the language spoken by the local Indigenous Peoples. At the age of eight he travelled by canoe and pony 500 miles to the South, which linked up to the rail line. From there he then travelled to St. Catharines to attend Ridley College. He was commissioned as an officer in the Royal Field Artillery in 1917 at the age of 19 and served in England and France from 1917–19. He graduated from the University of Toronto in 1924 and practiced general medicine in St. Catharines for a few years, before doing postgraduate training in obstetrics and gynecology in New York, Salzburg and Vienna.

Dr. Weaver, one of the first consultant obstetricians and gynecologists in Hamilton. He established his practice in 1933 and was the first to limit his practice exclusively to this specialty. He was chief of obstetrics and gynecology at the Hamilton Civic Hospitals from 1942–58. During that time, he established a strong department and was responsible for training a number of obstetricians and gynecologists, who now practice in Hamilton and throughout Canada. He was a significant force in Canada in promoting gynecology as a specialty and in raising the standards of gynecological care. Dr. Weaver was especially skillful at vaginal surgery and was mainly responsible for its widespread use in Canada. He had a special interest in gynecological malignancy and served for many years on the Medical Advisory Committee of the Ontario Cancer Foundation.

Dr. Weaver retired from active practice in 1973.Dr. Weaver would pass away a year later.

Dr. Bronislaw Wisniewski was born in Warsaw, Poland on November 28, 1909, to Leiba (Leon) Waksman and Jenta (Antonina) Szyszko. Having graduated from the Medical School of Warsaw in 1935, Dr. Wisniewski worked as an intern at the Jewish hospital (Czyste hospital) in Warsaw and then at the Wolski hospital at Plocka Street. After the German invasion of Poland, he moved to the ghetto and worked at the Jewish Hospital on Stawki Street and participated in clandestine teaching. When the Germans started destroying the ghetto and deporting people to Treblinka, he managed to get out of the ghetto and lived in hiding on the estate of Count Zamoyski near Lublin. With the mobilization of the physicians, he was incorporated to the Polish army and worked as the chief of internal medicine in a hospital arranged at the Bobolanum. In 1944 he moved to Bydgoszcz and then went back to Warsaw. He was in charge of the medical department of the military hospital at Koszykowa Street before his discharge from the army. After the war Dr. Wisniewski worked as the chief of internal medicine in a hospital at Zoliborz and then became a professor in the postgraduate medical school of Warsaw in 1950. In 1957 he went to Israel and stayed there for 14 months, working at Tel Hashomer Hospital. In his late forties he arrived in the United States and settled in New York, where he worked in Columbia Medical School (Bellevue) as an assistant to Andre Cournand and then in New York University Medical School until his retirement in July 1988.

Dr. Bronislawa J. Wygodzka Was Born in Warsaw, Poland, on Christmas eve, 1922, the daughter of Marek Wygodzki and Maria Wygodzka. During the war she met her husband, Stefan Lipski, and worked with him in a military division in the Polish underground army (AK, Armja Krajowa). She was trained as a sanitary nurse in hospitals while at the same time she took medical classes in the Warsaw ghetto underground medical school. After the war she went to Lodz with her husband, attended the University of Lodz and obtained her MD degree. She died in Warsaw on April 7, 1996.

Dr. Janina Zaborowska was born in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1918. Her father was a commandant of the underground Polish army in the Ukraine who died in 1925. Her mother was a mathematician who became an accountant in the Polish Red Cross Central Office. Her family went to Warsaw in December 1922, where she finished high school in 1937 and got into medical school of Warsaw University the same year. In 1938, She married her husband Eugene Zaborowski, who was an officer in the Polish army. After the outbreak of the war her husband was captured and prisoned in a concentration camp in the Gulag Archipelago until 1943. In the meantime, Dr. Zaborowska was in Warsaw and involved in the Girl Guide, an underground organization. In 1939 she worked as a nurse in the field hospital and became a bath woman on the clean side in 1940. Following that she was appointed to run a scabies clinic till 1944, when the uprising started. She was also in charge of Warsaw Communication Services and became involved with the Intelligence Service as a secretary to one of the chiefs of the districts in 1943. She was also the commandant of the communications for the whole Warsaw between 1942-1944. She was in the camp at Bergen-Belsen until they were released in 1945 by Canadian and American forces. After the war, Dr. Zaborowska went to Brussels in 1945 to work with the Red Cross before she received a scholarship and entered the university of Brussels to continue her medical study. She reunited with her in Brussels. They came to Canada, living in Oakville, Ontario, and had two children there.