Blanche Vivian Chudyk nee Reid (1923-2016) was a graduate of the Hamilton General Hospital School of Nursing Class of 1946B.
Dr. Gerald S. (Gerry) Cohen (1931-2017) was a physician, educator, and musician.
Dr. Cohen earned an M.D. degree from the University of Toronto in 1955. After completing an internship, he opened a family practice in Toronto in 1957. His wife, Dr. May Cohen (m. 1952), joined his practice in the summer of 1958. In 1977, he joined the Faculty of Health Sciences at McMaster University in the Department of Family Medicine.
Dr. Cohen was also a talented clarinetist and saxophonist. For twenty-five years, he was a member of the Burlington Concert Band.
Dr. Cohen passed away in Toronto on November 16, 2017 at the age of 86.
Dr. May Cohen (b. 1931) is a family physician, educator, activist, researcher, former university administrator, and advocate of women physicians and women’s health.
Cohen was born in Montréal and raised in Toronto. Her parents—Sam and Manya Lipshitz—were Jewish émigrés to Canada from Eastern Europe and progressive political activists. At an early age, Cohen resolved to become a doctor. She graduated from high school as the top student in Ontario. Cohen attended medical school at the University of Toronto where less than ten percent of medical students were women. In 1955, she graduated at the top of her class and earned a gold medal for academic excellence.
For twenty years, Cohen practiced family medicine in Toronto with her husband, Dr. Gerald (Gerry) S. Cohen (1931-2017; m. 1952). The couple also raised three sons during this time.
Abortion was illegal in Canada when Cohen began her career. Though most of her patients were able to travel to England for a legal abortion, it became clear to her that the law was problematic when one of her patients died from complications of an illegal abortion. Women should have the right to autonomy over their own bodies, Cohen argued. After the law was amended in 1969 to allow abortion under certain circumstances, she joined the abortion decision committee at Branson Hospital and fought for access to legal and safe abortions for Canadian women. She became a prominent voice in debates surrounding the right of women to choose abortion.
In 1975—International Women’s Year—Cohen traveled to Shelburne, Nova Scotia to lead a workshop on women’s health as part of a project funded by the Canadian government. There, she came to realize that women living in some areas of the country did not have access to routine breast exams or pap smears. From here on, Cohen campaigned to ensure that women’s health needs were being appropriately met across Canada.
Two years later, Cohen was appointed to the Department of Family Medicine in the Faculty of Health Sciences at McMaster University.
From 1987-1988, while on sabbatical, Cohen travelled to Australia to deliver seminars to doctors on how to discuss human sexuality with their patients. There, she learned of an ongoing study investigating women’s health needs in each state. Inspired by this effort, upon her return, Cohen spearheaded the development of a Women’s Health Office at McMaster. Founded in 1991, this office was the first of its kind in any Canadian medical school. Its mandate was to research and raise awareness of diseases that affect women differently. Several other Canadian medical schools subsequently decided to found similar offices. A group of academics from the five Ontario medical schools was eventually formed, called the Women’s Health Inter School Curriculum Committee (WHISCC), to pursue a united effort.
In 1990 and 1991, Cohen served as President of the Federation of Medical Women in Canada. Between 1991 and 1996, she served the Faculty of Health Sciences as Associate Dean of Health Services. She is now retired and lives in Toronto.
A pioneer of women’s health and a champion of gender-based healthcare, Cohen has called on the medical profession to reconsider its approach to women’s health concerns and to recognise the particularities of women’s health. She has advocated the right of a woman to make decisions regarding her own health. She has also played an important role in raising awareness and advancing the treatment of women’s health issues ranging from cancer to domestic abuse.
Cohen has advocated gender equality within the medical profession and has broken down barriers for women physicians. She has challenged the male-centric paradigm in medicine and has called on medical schools to include women’s health in their curricula. She is also a pioneer in teaching medical students and physicians about healthy sexual practices and eliminating sexual taboos and gender stereotyping.
Cohen has earned numerous prestigious awards and honours. These include the Canadian Medical Association Medal of Service and the Governor General’s Award in Commemoration of the Persons Case. In 2016, she was inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame. One year later, she was named an Officer of the Order of Canada. Awards and positions named in her honour include the Eli Lilly-May Cohen Chair in Women’s Health at McMaster. In 2019, two of Cohen’s colleagues, Dr. Cheryl Levitt and Dr. Barbara Lent, released a short documentary about her called The Gender Lady: The Fabulous Dr. May Cohen.
Walter Dent was born in Parry Sound, Ontario on April 12th, 1917, to Walter Dent Senior, and Susan Bradley. His father died before he was born and he was raised by his mother, along with his 9 siblings. Dent attended school until grade 10, at which time he left to pursue work.
Dent participated in the “On-to-Ottawa trek” in 1935 and joined the Young Communist League in 1936. In February of 1937 at the age of 20, Dent arrived in Albacete, Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War. The Canadian Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion had not yet been formed, and he served instead in the American Lincoln Battalion. Due to the urgent need for men, Dent and his cohort were rushed to the battlefront without training, but he found that he was a natural with a gun. A head injury sent him to a hospital in Murcia and then to the village of Benicassim to convalesce. He attributed the healing of his head wound to daily swims in the Mediterranean Sea. Once recovered, Dent had a month’s training before returning to the front and fighting in the Battle of Brunete (July 6-25th, 1937). In September of 1937, Dent travelled by ship to New York, before returning to Spain the following month.
In October of 1937, religious leader and politician Reverend A. E. Smith came to Spain looking for soldiers to join him on a tour of Canada; Dent and fellow soldier Jack Steele volunteered and returned to Canada. The trio spent two months touring the country raising awareness and money for the fight in Spain and for wounded homecoming soldiers. Once home in Toronto, Dent discovered that an abscess had formed on the back of his head – a result of the injury he had sustained in Spain – and had it removed by Dr. Willinsky at Mount Sinai Hospital.
Dent was awarded an International Brigades' medal in January of 1939 for his service in the Spanish Civil War. Dent then served in the Second World War with the British Army. Dent later joined the Mackenzie Papineau Veterans Association in Toronto.
He was married to his partner Nancy and as a civilian worked as a carpenter. He died on May 9th, 1993.
Ethel S.C. Duff (maiden name Ethel Sage Colter) was born near Balcarres, Saskatchewan on October 7, 1906, to William Henry Colter and Nellie Sage Moorehouse. As daughter of a minister who had to move every three years, she lived all over Saskatchewan during her childhood. After graduating from high school, she went to a normal school in Regina and started teaching in 1924. After the Great Depression hit, she went to United College and married her first husband, Aaron Magid (b. 1905), who was then a practicing physician at Sceptre, Saskatchewan. in 1934, the couple went to Winnipeg, where Dr. Magid practiced medicine in the north end of Winnipeg and at the same time actively involved in politics as a communist. In the spring of 1937, Dr. Magid went to Spain and served as a doctor in the front lines doing first aid work near the trenches. A year later, Ethel went to Spain to join her husband and stayed in Barcelona for a month before coming back to Canada. Two months after Ethel’s returning to Canada, in October 1938, Dr. Magid went back Canada as well. The couple went to Magrath and stayed there until 1948, when Dr. Magid bought a practice from a doctor in Niagara Falls and moved out there.
Eisen was born in Vilno, Poland, on December 17, 1908. She finished high school in 1932 and accepted nursing training in a school called Dolsz. After moving from Vilno to Warsaw, she worked as a nurse in hospitals in Czyste. She took her State Board Examination in 1938 and then worked as a full-fledged nurse in hospitals in the Warsaw ghettos until the mass deportations began in 1943. She managed to escape from the ghetto and worked with a church from 1943 to 1945. She got married at 48 years old and moved to New York.
Dr. Fenigstein was born in Warsaw, Poland, on May 12, 1913, to Zygmund Fenigstein and Julia Kissin. Dr. Fenigstein studied in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Warsaw before being conscripted to the Officer's Medical Academy of the Polish army in September 1937. In April 1940, Dr. Fenigstein went to the Warsaw Jewish Hospital, working as an assistant physician in the department of pathology. He taught anatomy and pathology in the Warsaw ghetto underground medical school and did plenty of research on topics like hunger disease until the first big liquidation of Warsaw ghetto on July 22, 1942. During the final liquidation starting on April 19, 1943, Dr. Fenigstein was sent south to a camp near the city of Lublin and from there he started his way through a few concentration camps in occupied Poland and then in Germany. He was liberated by the 3rd American army near Munich on April 30, 1945. After the war, Dr. Fenigstein studied obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Munich, Frauenklinik. In September 1948, he moved to Toronto, Canada, where he started as a general practitioner and then worked as a family physician. After acquiring certification in psychiatry from the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, Dr. Fenigstein started working as a practicing psychiatrist. He also taught at Sunnybrook Hospital as a teaching staff for many years before he resigned in 1970.
