‘That’s my speech,’ MD recalls saying at medical conference
Canadians left world group after ‘word for word’ plagiarism of address
Dr. Chris Simpson was sitting in a conference room in Reykjavik, Iceland, when the past came back to haunt him.
He was listening to the inaugural speech of the World Medical Association’s new president and the words started sounding a little too familiar.
Simpson is a past president of the Canadian Medical Association and he said he knows the importance of a president’s first address — after a deep, personal reflection to the inaugural speech he wrote as CMA president in 2014.
Last Friday, it was Dr. Leonid Eidelman’s turn to deliver his talk before members of the international association, created in 1947 to uphold the medical ethics of physicians around the world.
“Throughout a lot of the speech he was delivering there were some themes that he was talking about that I remember thinking, well that sounds kind of familiar,” said Simpson, a cardiologist and vice-dean of the Queen’s University School of Medicine.
“He talked about the ‘social contract,’ which is a very Canadian term and I used that frequently in my speech as well.
“But I didn’t think anything of it other than it was just generally familiar,” he said, in a telephone interview from Iceland.
“But when he began a series of sentences, I knew two sentences in. “I said, ‘That’s my speech.’ “I said it out loud to people sitting beside me. And then I started citing it along with him as he was reading it.
“I was talking out loud, the same words.”
Ultimately, Eidelman’s speech led to the CMA’s resignation from the World Medical Association.
But an official call for Eidelman’s resignation was voted down.
A spokesperson for the World Medical Association said Eidelman later apologized before the assembly.
In an email, the spokesperson said Eidelman told the association his speech was translated from Hebrew with “help from English speechwriters.”
“I was totally unaware if any English phrases were taken from other sources. And I am really sorry.”
CMA president Dr. Gigi Osler said the group resigned over the issue of integrity — particularly when the conference theme focused on medical ethics.
“We strongly believe that as physicians at the CMA and as leaders, we have to uphold a high level of integrity and honesty,” Osler said.
Simpson said as an academic physician, he demands high ethical standards from his students.
Plagiarism, he said, comes with “serious consequences up to and including dismissal” from some universities in Canada.
On Friday, while the other international delegates left for a bus tour of Reykjavik, the Canadians went back to their hotel and started researching.
They got a copy of Simpson’s 2014 speech and compared it to the text of the speech that Eidelman had just delivered.
“It was word for word,” Simpson said, “with a semi colon in the same place and commas in the same place.”
According to the CMA, both speeches used the same text.
The text of Simpson’s speech was as follows:
“Every day, we are given the great privilege of being invited into our patients’ lives.
“We are with patients when they are born and when they die; we provide advice and comfort; we prevent illness and treat and manage disease.
“Our patients trust us, and we have always taken our advocacy role very seriously. It is part of the essence of our professionalism …”
Osler said once the group found that passage, they decided to look for other instances of plagiarism.
“Just by doing a simple Google search we were able to identify other sources which were also taken” from blogs and websites, she said.
“That’s when it sunk in,” Osler said.
“It wasn’t one line. It wasn’t two lines. It was obvious.”
The decision to demand Eidelman’s resignation was made with Osler, the CMA president, along with the association’s CEO, its board chair and other delegates, he said.
On Saturday, back in the conference room, Simpson said he rose on a point of personal privilege, provided the documentation showing plagiarism and asked for Eidelman’s resignation.
The vote was not successful,” Simpson said.