Mac the Knife put patients first
Served as chief of surgery at National Defence Medical Centre
As Don Maciver, Jr. readied himself recently to go to Toronto for his father’s memorial service, one of the items he packed was a copy of Arthur Herman’s book How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It.
The hyperbole of its rambling title aside, Maciver discovered in the book a number of passages that remarkably and neatly encapsulated his father, Donald Angus Maciver, who graduated from the University of Edinburgh’s medicine program when he was just 21 and spent most of his lengthy career as a surgeon with the British and Canadian militaries.
Maciver, Jr. highlighted parts of the book that best described his father, and included them in his eulogy to help paint a picture for mourners. This was one of the passages:
“Other medical schools, especially Oxford and Cambridge, discouraged their students from any kind of physical contact with the patient. Probing a tender spot, or cleaning and dressing a wound — let alone cutting someone open to see what was going on — was left to menial servants, such as the barber-surgeon. Edinburgh taught its doctors to be hands-on generalists, who could spot a problem, make a diagnosis and apply treatment themselves.”
That very well sums up the man who was known by friends and colleagues as Mac the Knife, a hands-on surgeon who depended more on patients’ accounts and his own knowledge of anatomy than on medical tests.
“If someone complained about something, it was real,” recalls his daughter-in-law Jeanine. “Otherwise they wouldn’t be standing in front of him. He didn’t rely on tests or machinery. He relied on questions and touch. And he had this uncanny ability to ask the right questions.
“In the end, you could always go to him, and he would find the answer.”
He was, adds Don Jr., first and foremost a doctor who put the needs of his patients above all else.
“My dad worked 24 hours a day, seven days a week. He was that kind of a guy.”
Mac’s typical day saw him at the hospital — he was chief of surgery at Ottawa’s National Defence Medical Centre from 1964 to 1978 — by eight o’clock each morning. He’d work on several cases, go home at five or five-thirty for dinner, then go straight back to the hospital to follow up on his patients.
“Every single night,” says Don Jr. “And that was what he expected from people who worked for him as well. He worked every Saturday, many Sundays, and I can’t remember a vacation that we went on where, just before the vacation, there wasn’t some sort of issue with a patient that he either had to follow up on before we left, or he was phoning back to see how things were going. “It was always on his mind.” He was born in 1920 in Inverness, Scotland, and, attending school with his older brother, John, reached the University of Edinburgh at just 16, where he became a full-fledged doctor at 21.
The Second World War was in full swing, and so he signed up immediately after graduating, but was not called up into the Royal Navy Reserve — known because of its peculiar insignia as the “Wavy Navy” — until the following January, in 1943.
During the war he served as ship’s surgeon aboard two vessels: HMS Bayntun and HMS Largs, the latter on which his service included the Operation Overlord D-Day invasion of Normandy, his actions there earning him a citation for “gallantry, skill, determination and undaunted devotion to duty during the landing of allied forces on the coast of Normandy.”
Later, aboard the same ship, he took part in the liberation of Burma. Never a man of many words, he very rarely spoke of his wartime experiences.
Soon after the war, he worked at the West Cumberland Hospital in Whitehaven, where, during one operation he was performing in 1947, he met Monica, an operating theatre nurse. They married the following year and had two children, Donald and Margaret.
The Chief, as he was also known, wasn’t strict, but he was serious and, about such things as politics, medicine and education, opinionated. He firmly believed that education, for example, was what lifted people and took them places, and he encouraged it at all turns, in himself, in his children, and in their children. At his memorial service, one of his grandchildren spoke of how throughout her schooling, and at university in particular, she often heard Mac’s voice at her shoulder, urging her to do her best.
“That was his expectation,” recalls Don Jr. “Education was the way out, to go to London or wherever and make something of yourself.”
In 1953, displeased with the National Heath program that was being rolled out in Britain, Mac emigrated with his family to Canada, where he served in the RCN, first on the HMCS Quebec and HMCS Labrador in the Arctic — where, while supplying and tending to military posts in the far north, Mac also helped address medical needs of the Inuit living there — and then the HMCS Stadacona base in Halifax.
A posting in Germany followed, after which, in 1964, the Macivers moved to Ottawa, where Mac served as chief of surgery at the National Defence Medical Centre until his unwilling retirement from the forces in 1978. (A sign of his devotion to his work, the family’s first home in Ottawa was on Kilborn Avenue, chosen by Mac because it was on an OC Transpo bus route, ensuring that the street would be among the first to be plowed in the winter and enabling him to get to the hospital and back without delays. Subsequent houses were also chosen for their proximity to the hospital.)
“He was all about the patients,” says Don Jr.
In Ottawa, he was also an associate professor of surgery at the University of Ottawa’s medical school, and in 1973 was honoured with the appointment as an the Officer of the Order of Military Merit.
He gardened, travelled — taking lots of photos with his Leica camera — smoked a pack a day until a year before his death, collected art and loved cars; he and his son went to Trans Am races at Mont Tremblant and rallies in Europe, and he closely followed the Formula One circuit. He had particular fondness for the sun and his Yorkie, Duchess.
After leaving the military, he went into private practice, briefly at Ottawa’s Grace Hospital, and then in Wallaceburg, Ont. In 1987, he retired again, and he and Monica moved to the sunny clime of Cyprus, where they stayed for a dozen years before returning to Canada.
In the end, at the age of 93, his body simply gave out. His mind, however, remained pin-sharp, and he continued to keep up on medical journals and each day pored through online editions of the London Observer, the Ottawa Citizen and papers from Edinburgh and Cyprus. He read books voraciously, particularly military ones and biographies.
“He learned to use the computer in his 80s,” notes Don Jr., “but was often frustrated at how slow they were.
“And if you wanted to know something, he’d learn it himself so he could teach you. He taught one of his caregivers how to read the stock market ticker at the bottom of the TV screen.”
“He had a thirst for knowledge,” adds Jeanine, “and a brilliant mind.”
Donald Angus Maciver died on Oct. 25 at the West Park Health Care Centre in Toronto, where his wife resides.