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.
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. 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. 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. 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.<sup>1</sup></blockquote>
Dr. Warwick became a Member of the Order of Canada in 1990.
- 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. Mary K. Tremblay (1944-2009) was an occupational therapist, educator, scholar of disability and rehabilitation, and an advocate for disabled peoples.
Tremblay earned a Diploma of Physical and Occupational Therapy from the University of Toronto in 1967 and began her career as a practitioner. In the following decade, she helped found the Occupational Therapy Program at Mohawk College and earned a Master’s of Health Sciences degree from McMaster University in 1977. In 1985, Tremblay became Director of the Degree Completion Program for Occupational Therapy and Physiotherapy at McMaster. In 1989, for one year, she served as Acting Associate Dean of the School of Rehabilitation Science, and, in 1991, became a tenured Associate Professor.
Tremblay earned her doctorate in 1993 at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Later that decade, she developed and taught one of the first courses on Human Rights and Disability, a course which won the 1997 McMaster University President’s Award for Course Design and was published by Amnesty International. Tremblay served as Curriculum Chair for the new Master of Clinical Health Sciences (Occupational Therapy) Program and was a member of the Program in Medical History. She retired in August 2009.
Tremblay was a central figure in the study of the history of disability and rehabilitation, spinal cord injury rehabilitation, war and disability in the twentieth century, aging with a pre-existing disability, disability and rehabilitation policy, and human rights of disabled peoples. She was particularly interested in the experiences of veterans and civilians who had suffered a spinal cord injury during the Second World War, with whom she conducted oral history interviews. Committed to social justice for disabled peoples, she was also an advocate for disabled war veterans and the disability rights movement.
Dr. Tremblay died on 13 October 2009 at the age of 65.
Dr. Tramer was born in Csechoslovakia and attended his high school there. In 1933 he went to a general university in Prague and graduated in 1939. After Germany occupied Poland, Dr. Tramer worked under Judenrat in a Jewish hospital in Sosnovice before being sent to a labor camp in Germany to practice medicine for a three-month interval. After one year back in Sosnovice he was sent to the camp again and from there he started his way from one labor camp to other. In 1943 the Germans liquidated all the labor camps and transferred Dr. Tramer and his wife Nelly Tramer to different concentration camps. Dr. Tramer went through Munslau, Nordhausen, Ellerich, and Oranienburg before finally being liberated by the Russians. After the war Dr. Tramer went back to Poland to reunite with his wife. In 1968 the family migrated to Canada.
Dr. Ludwig Stabholz was born on November 11, 1911, in Warsaw, Poland to Lgnacy Yitzkhak Stabholz and Franciszka Stabholz. After graduation from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Warsaw in May 1939, Dr. Stabholz worked as a surgeon in the surgery department of the Jewish Hospital (Czyste Hospital). In the meantime, he taught anatomy in the Warsaw ghetto underground medical school for two semesters, until the liquidation started. Before the Warsaw ghetto uprising in April 1943, Dr. Stabholz was smuggled out of the ghetto and hid in Milosna, a village outside Warsaw. In the spring of 1944, Dr. Stabholz and his wife made their way to the Soviet forces, and then Lublin, where Dr. Stabholz joined the Polish army. Following the war, Dr. Stabholz continued to serve with the Polish army's medical corps in a military hospital in Gdansk, helping with the rehabilitation of wounded war veterans. Dr. Stabholz immigrated to Israel in 1950 and dedicated his professional life to the research and development of spinal treatment. Dr. Stabholz Died in 2007 in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Dr. Tadeusz Stabholtz was born on Nov. 16, 1916, in Warsaw, Poland, to Henryk Stabholz and Sabina Stabholz. He Attended the University of Warsaw school of Medicine and completed two years of medical study before the war broke out. He was in Warsaw when the Germans started the bombardment. Then he went to Lwow, where he was sent to a small city (Zbaraz) close to the Russian border to organize the hospital. In March 1940, he went to Warsaw again, where he attended part-time the Warsaw ghetto medical school from 1940 to 1942. In the meanwhile, he did quite a bit of clinical work in the Jewish Hospital in Czyste. He survived in the mass deportation and lived in hiding near the hospital on Gesia from September 1942 to early May 1943. After the collapse of the ghetto uprising, he was transported to the extermination camp in Treblinka and selected there as fit for work. He came to Majdanek. In the summer of 1943, he was deported to Auschwitz. He was also a prisoner of the camps in Sachsenhausen, Dachau XI and Dachau IV (Kaufering). After the war, he married Ewa Weinzman and emigrated to the USA, where in 1953 he completed his medical studies. He practiced in Ohio. He died on March 22, 2009.