Edward William Archibald

Edward William Archibald is widely recognized as one of the forefathers of thoracic surgery. He is also remembered for his excellence as a scientist, educator and technician.

Born in Montreal in 1872, Archibald was sent as a teenager to school in Grenoble, France. He returned to Canada and enrolled at McGill University, and in 1896 he received his MD and started a three-year residency at the Royal Victoria Hospital following its opening in 1893. After becoming gravely ill with and eventually overcoming pulmonary tuberculosis, Archibald began a serious study of the disease and was soon regarded as a leader in the field. In 1912, he became the first surgeon in North America to treat tuberculosis with surgical thoracoplasty.

Archibald's career continued to thrive and in 1923 he became senior professor of surgery at McGill, although he would have to wait until 1939 to be named surgeon-in-chief of the Royal Victoria Hospital. In addition to being an accomplished thoracic surgeon, Archibald was a pioneer in neurosurgery, publishing a nearly 400-page monograph on wounds of the head and, in 1928, recruiting Drs. Wilder Penfield and William Cone to McGill.

While Archibald's field of expertise focused on the control of breathing and surgery of the thoracic cavity, his surgical activities were tremendously varied and he published articles on a range of subjects, including bowel cancer, kidney tumours, pancreatic diseases and injuries, surgery for intestinal tuberculosis and the surgical treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis. Ahead of his time, he published articles on surgery of the head well before brain surgery was a specialized field. Having served in the First World War and acted as consulting surgeon to the Directorate of Medical Services in Ottawa during the Second World War, Archibald also wrote extensively about war wounds for which he had developed new treatment techniques.

Archibald felt deeply that “true advance in surgery must come from research,” and is often credited with moving surgical education in Canada from the clinical to the scientific. Archibald died in 1945, but his name lives on through the Edward Archibald Professorship of Surgery at McGill University.