Surgical Limits: The Life of Gordon Murray (review)

Concise, though richly detailed, Shelly McKellar's reluctant biography of Dr Gordon Murray (1894-1976) carefully captures the brilliant, though often restless, lonely, and ultimately tragic life of a Canadian surgical pioneer, forever testing his own surgical limits and those of the Toronto medical establishment. It is a reluctant biography because McKellar was not particularly interested in writing about medical lives, much less about 'great doctors, and shivered at the thought of doing "dead white guy history"' (vii). Her biography of Murray grew out of an interest in the history of medical technology, innovation and change, medical knowledge diffusion, and the concept of cure. Specifically, her interest in Murray developed from his building of the first North American artificial kidney machine in Toronto in the 1940s. In the process of analysing this new piece of homemade medical technology, McKellar soon found herself 'drawn into this surgeon's extraordinary and controversial career' (vii). Fortunately, McKellar's reluctant approach to tackling a biography of a 'great doctor' like Murray turned out to be quite successful, well written, illuminating, and effective.

Surgical Limits began as a PhD thesis McKellar wrote at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Michael Bliss, a Canadian historian well experienced in the art of biography writing, including biographies of such great Canadian doctors as Frederick Banting and William Osler. Interestingly, in her preface that outlines her apprehensions about writing a medical biography, McKellar does not mention Bliss's Banting or Osler biographies, but pointed to Judith Leavitt's Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public's Health and Jacalyn Duffin's Langstaff: A Nineteenth-Century Medical Life. While both biographies are noteworthy, it would seem that Bliss's Banting: A Biography, in particular, would be a more relevant model for a study of Murray's life as a Canadian surgeon and a celebrated, though tragic, medical hero.

There are many similarities between Murray and Banting beyond their shared surgical passions, high public profile, and frustrations at Toronto General Hospital. They were contemporaries - Banting born in 1891 and Murray in 1894 - and both spent most of their lives in Toronto, often the focus of newspapers looking for their next great life-saving discovery. If Banting had not died in a plane crash in 1941, the remainder of his life may well have played out along lines similar to Murray's: working in isolation, driven to repeat and surpass past triumphs, and pushing surgical limits beyond the breaking point, despite the risks to patients and professional reputation.

McKellar's life of Gordon Murray follows this path. She takes the reader from the celebrated triumphs of Murray's pioneering clinical use of heparin (a blood anticoagulant prepared and purified by Connaught Laboratories) in the late 1930s under the leadership of insulin co-discoverer Charles H. Best, followed by his 'blue baby' surgical successes, and the building, and clinical use, of his artificial kidney on patients in the 1940s. The tone of the story, however, shifts sharply in the 1950s after Murray abruptly left Toronto General Hospital and the University of Toronto to set up his own private research laboratory, the W.P. Caven Memorial Research Foundation (later the Gardiner Medical Research Foundation), in a small house in Toronto to independently pursue surgical and other medical problems that interested him. Murray's first such research problem was not surgical, but rather the surprising development, production, application, and public championing of a dubious anti-cancer serum. This was followed by a questionable and sensational method of mending severed spinal cords and curing paraplegia in the 1960s that forced a controversial end to his surgical career.

McKellar's Gordon Murray was a brilliant surgeon, though ultimately a flawed character. He was driven by the dichotomy of looking forward, pushing his surgical limits to solve the next great medical problems, while remaining locked in a fiercely individualistic approach to surgery and research that had served him well in the 1930s and early 1940s, but left him...