Alexander Dougall Blackader

A pioneer in the field of pediatrics in North America, Alexander Dougall Blackader was among the first physicians to maintain that children’s diseases should be regarded as a specialty, distinct from adult diseases.

Born in Montreal, Blackader spent much of his childhood and adolescence in Ontario, where as a teenager he worked for three years as an assistant to a pharmacist. He returned to Montreal and entered McGill University in 1866, then moved to England to pursue postgraduate studies and to act as the Resident Physician at the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children for four months. It was likely there that he developed his keen interest in children’s diseases.

Blackader began practising as a physician in Montreal in 1877 and joined the staff of the Faculty of Medicine at McGill in 1882 as Instructor in Diseases of Children. It was at the Montreal General Hospital that he initiated Canada’s first pediatric clinic. At the age of 72, after serving as acting dean of McGill’s Faculty of Medicine from 1915 to 1918, Blackader took on the ambitious task of editing the Canadian Medical Association Journal, which almost ceased publication when the Canadian Medical Association fell on hard times during the First World War. With Blackader as editor, the Journal thrived. He remained there for ten years before retiring in 1929.

Blackader held a number of impressive positions throughout his career. He was the founding president of the Canadian Society for the Study of Diseases in Children, a founding member and eventual president of the American Pediatric Society, and an honorary member of the British Paediatric Association (now the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health). He died in 1932, but is remembered through the Blackader Lectureship in Diseases of Children that the Canadian Medical Association created in acknowledgment of the many contributions he made to his field.