Doctor fought for reform in the way babies are delivered
Dr. Murray Enkin introduced childbirth practices that became the standard of care in Canada
A lot has changed in childbirth and maternity care since the 1960s and one of the people credited with that is Dr. Murray Enkin.
The former chief of obstetrics and gynecology at St. Joseph’s Hospital and McMaster University professor pushed reform in the field, including underwater birthing methods, Lamaze techniques for couples and legalizing midwives. He helped write books, including “A Guide to Effective Care in Pregnancy and Childbirth,” and served as editor of the Cochrane Collaboration, a research centre based in England created to assess medical trials around the world.
Murray — invested into the Order of Canada in 2013 for his achievements — spoke about changes to childbirth when midwifery became a program at McMaster in 1993.
“When I started out in Hamilton in 1955 women were asleep for delivery, any thought of having companions with them was absolutely unheard of, breastfeeding was not encouraged and rooming-in wasn’t allowed,” he said.
He also recalled sneaking his two older children up the back stairs at St. Joe’s to see their mother after she gave birth.
Enkin, who also received a honorary doctorate from McMaster in 2001, died June 6 in Victoria, B.C. He was 97.
Apart from medical achievements, Enkin is also credited with helping birth a popular cartoon strip. One of his patients in the early 1970s was Lynn Johnston, a medical artist at McMaster.
The then-Dundas resident created 80 cartoons on pregnancy to hang on his office wall. After the birth of her son, Enkin and his wife Eleanor had Johnston over for dinner and had the cartoons spread out all over their living-room floor.
“He had a bottle of champagne and said, ‘Kid, you’ve got a book,’ ” Johnston told The Spec in 1999. The result was “David, We’re Pregnant” and Johnston went on in 1979 to create “For Better or For Worse,” read by 100 million people around the world.
“Dr. Enkin was an exemplar, always pleasant and a diplomat who nonetheless made his views known,” Karyn Kaufman, founding director of McMaster’s Midwifery Education Program, said in a McMaster Faculty of Health Sciences statement.
“He was persuasive and could laugh at himself … His whole emphasis was on birth being not such a medical process, but as something that is an important milestone in people’s lives that you celebrate. You don’t just treat it as another medical procedure — women would come from Toronto to Hamilton to give birth under his care.”
Alfonso Iorio, chair of the department of Health Research Methods Evidence and Impact (HEI) at McMaster, called Enkin a giant in his field.
“He introduced practices around childbirth that became the standard of care in Canada,” he said in a statement.
Dr. Gordon Guyatt, a HEI professor and Order of Canada recipient in 2011 for work on evidence-based medicine, said Enkin “captured the spirit of innovation and challenged authority” during his career.
“He was an extraordinary man and an extraordinary friend,” he said.
Enkin was born May 29, 1924, in Toronto to Max and Pearl Enkin.
His father, owner of Hamilton menswear maker Cambridge Clothes (now Coppley), was invested into the Order of Canada in 1983 for helping refugees settle in Canada after the Second World War.
Enkin graduated from medical school at the University of Toronto in 1947. He worked as a family doctor in Saskatchewan and then went to Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he trained in obstetrics. He came to Hamilton in 1955 and eventually went to work at St. Joe’s. He was among the inaugural faculty of the McMaster medical school in 1965. He retired in 1988.
The obstetric and gynecology department established the Enkin lecture in 1999 in honour of the doctor and his wife Eleanor for their contributions to childbirth and maternity care. It celebrated humanitarianism in health care and ran until 2017. The doctor was inducted into the Community of Distinction of the health sciences faculty in 2003.
Outside of medicine, Enkin had many hobbies, including hiking, canoeing, photography, tropical fish, playing the guitar and building a train set.
Enkin is survived by his children Susan, Nomi, Jane and Randy, seven grandchildren, one great-grandchild and his brother Larry. He was predeceased by his wife Eleanor in 2019.