Dr. John Gerald FitzGerald founded the Connaught Labs and his work may have saved thousands of lives, yet it couldn't save his own

The recent E. coli-contaminated water scandal in Walkerton, Ont., serves as a jolting reminder of what Canadian medicine achieved over the past century and what it now risks losing ­ our hard-won international reputation as a leader in public health and preventive medicine.

That singular accomplishment was due in part to the vision of my grandfather, Dr. John Gerald FitzGerald, the founder of the Connaught Laboratories in 1914 and the University of Toronto school of hygiene in 1925. His story is a highly dramatic one, yet still largely unknown to most Canadians.

An intense, red-haired man driven by a passionate ambition, Gerry FitzGerald was born in 1882 in Drayton, Ont., a village north of Kitchener. The grandson of Irish Protestant immigrants, he entered medical school at the University of Toronto at age 16 and graduated at 20, the youngest in his class. Initially drawn to psychiatry, he changed direction at age 25, perhaps feeling he could accomplish far more in the emerging fields of bacteriology and public health.

In the summer of 1910, Dr. FitzGerald worked at the Pasteur Institute at its branches in Paris and in Brussels, learning how to make rabies, diphtheria and smallpox vaccines, and anti-toxins. Over the next three years, he kept up a blistering pace, travelling the world studying pathology and bacteriology at the University of Freiburg in Germany, the Lister Institute in London, the New York City department of health and the University of California at Berkeley.

In 1913, armed with his international training, he returned to Canada ready to execute his master plan to build the infrastructure of Canada's public health system. Then an associate professor of hygiene at U of T, he prepared the first indigenous anti-rabies vaccine in Canada at a small provincial board of health lab at 5 Queen's Park Circle.

Encouraged by this success, he boldly proposed to the University of Toronto that they manufacture and distribute a Canadian-made diphtheria anti-toxin at one-fifth the cost of imported products. Diphtheria was a major scourge in those days: from 1880 to 1929, more than 36,000 Canadian children died of the disease. A single dose of imported anti-toxin was prohibitively expensive ­ $25 ­ the equivalent of two weeks' wages for most families.

The university administration initially declined Dr. FitzGerald's proposal ­ the idea of uniting an academic institution with the commercial production of biomedical products was unprecedented anywhere in the world and considered too radical. Impatient, he plunged ahead on his own initiative. With $3,000 borrowed from his wife's inheritance, he built a rudimentary stable on Barton Avenue, near Bloor and Bathurst Streets, and stocked it with lab equipment. He bought five horses for $5 each and hired a technician to bleed the horses to produce the anti-toxin. (The process of making diphtheria anti-toxin involved injecting a horse with a small, non-lethal amount of diphtheria toxin which would mix with the horse's blood. The anti-toxin would then be obtained from the pseudoglobulin of the horse through bleeding and fractional precipitation with ammonium sulphate.)

Following the diphtheria success, the U of T board of governors finally approved Dr. FitzGerald's idea and the University of Toronto Anti-Toxin Laboratories were formed on May 1, 1914. The idea, of course, was that a full range of preventive medicines should be available free to all Canadians.

With the outbreak of the First World War only three months later, the fledgling lab was suddenly overwhelmed with the demand for preventive medicines to inoculate thousands of Canadian soldiers fighting on the Western Front. Philanthropist Albert Gooderham, chairman of the Ontario Red Cross, came to the rescue and donated 58 acres of farmland at Dufferin and Steeles and money for more extensive lab buildings.

The labs quickly grew into a dynamic wartime factory, pumping out enormous quantities of tetanus toxoid, anti-typhoid vaccine, diphtheria anti-toxin and anti-meningitis serum, thereby helping reverse the trend of as many soldiers dying of disease in the trenches as from actual war wounds. In 1917, at Gooderham's request, the Anti-Toxin Labs were re-named the Connaught Laboratories after the governor-general of Canada, Prince Arthur, the Duke of Connaught, the youngest son of Queen Victoria.

Thus, within only 10 years of the building of a primitive horse stable on Barton Ave, two fortuitous historical events ­ the First World War and the discovery of insulin in 1922 ­ dramatically vaulted Canadian medicine into a world leadership position. Amazingly, the Connaught Labs' production capacity was now comparable to the Pasteur Institute in Paris and the Lister Institute in London.

In 1925, the Rockefeller Foundation, impressed with Dr. FitzGerald's work, donated $1.2 million for the establishment of a school of public health, only the third in the world, after Johns Hopkins and Harvard. For decades, the Connaught Labs and its academic arm, the school of hygiene, together formed an independent, self-sustaining division of the U of T. Its combination of research, teaching and manufacturing of biomedical products in the name of public service is said to be the first in the world. In 1972, the university sold the Connaught and it was privatized. Today, it is part of the Aventis Pasteur pharmaceutical empire.

During the 1930s, Dr. FitzGerald hurled himself into even more demanding work, serving as dean of medicine at U of T and scientific director of the Rockefeller Foundation, the first Canadian appointed to that position. But by the late 1930s, exhausted by years of overwork, his inner demons were now starting to overtake him. Tragically and mysteriously, on June 20, 1940, he took his own life at age 57 ­ at the peak of his professional success.

With the recent discovery of revealing personal letters, I am hoping to shed new light on this dynamic, psychologically complex pioneer of Canadian public health with a long overdue biography ­ the compelling story of a Canadian Prometheus who saved thousands of lives yet couldn't save his own. My book still lacks a title, but I'm tempted to call it: "Physician, Heal Thyself".

James FitzGerald is a Toronto writer and author of "Old Boys: The Powerful Legacy of Upper Canada College" (Macfarlane, Walter & Ross, 1994). His is currently working on a biography of Dr. J.G. FitzGerald.

Reprinted from The Medical Post, with the author's permission.