Tim Lougheed
Few medical procedures can match the sheer drama of successful organ transplantation by regularly rescuing patients from the brink of death and enabling them to lead healthy lives. Yet this triumph of life also contains the tragedy of death, since organ donors are often individuals who have died suddenly and unexpectedly.
As an attending physician in Pediatric Critical Care Medicine at the Montreal Children’s Hospital and McGill University, Dr. Sam Shemie has spent most of his career dealing with this difficult juxtaposition of life and death.
“The intensive care unit is the place where technology is routinely deployed to support life-threatening organ failure, and transplantation can replace failing organs when they are irreversibly damaged,” he says.
Working with the Canadian Council for Donation and Transplantation, he has been instrumental in the development of national guidelines to improve organ donation services in Canadian hospitals. Now, as holder of the University of Ottawa’s Bertram Loeb Chair in Organ and Tissue Donation, he will bring that experience into a larger academic setting.
While retaining his hospital duties in Montreal, Shemie will also spend part of his time in Ottawa, where he expects the chair to assemble an unprecedented collaboration of disciplines on this increasingly important topic.
“Donation is a beautiful act,” he says. “It is a real symbolic representation of cooperation between people in a civilized society who understand that the loss of somebody is a major tragedy in one’s life, and if you can prevent it, that’s a good thing.”
Yet many people in our society find the concept of organ donation to be distasteful, if not downright horrifying. For Shemie, this attitude need not be inevitable. Spain has achieved the world’s highest levels of donation through a commitment to hospital services and public celebration of the fact that the death of a loved one may permit someone else to go on living.
“It’s much more an accepted part of societal obligations,” he says, referring to the need for Canadians to integrate this same outlook in their own cultural fabric.
Cultivating this change was one of the key motivations for creating the chair, which was established with a $1-million gift from the Bertram Loeb Organ-Tissue Donation Institute. The institute, created in 2002 by Ottawa business leader and philanthropist, the late Bertram Loeb, is dedicated to raising the awareness and understanding of transplantation in Canadian society, as well as increasing the number of people willing to participate in the process.
Shemie points out that this field is just beginning to be defined in scholarly circles, and he expects the University of Ottawa chair to serve as a model for other universities in Canada and throughout the world. He was initially surprised to find such a post located in the Faculty of Arts, but he concluded that this is an optimal vantage point from which to review the many different facets of a complex subject.
“As I thought about it more and more, it made a lot of sense,” he says. “If you seat the chair in medicine, it becomes purely biomedical, but if you sit it in the arts with a focus on the humanities, you can engage the many disciplines that this affects. Advances in technology, life support systems and the use of human organs for transplantation have wide societal implications. Donation is inexorably linked to death and death is profound, not simply biomedical.”
