Tag: medicine

Profile: Dorothy Dworkin, nurse & Mount Sinai founder

Dorothy Goldstick (later Dworkin) donned the modest white cap of a maternity nurse in 1909, but her accomplishments ranged into charitable work and philanthropy, business, newspaper publishing, and institution building on a scale that benefitted the entire city of Toronto. A driving force behind the establishment of Toronto’s world-famous Mount Sinai Hospital, Dworkin (1889-1976) was…

Saving the Babies of Toronto’s Poor—Pure Milk Depots Doing Grand Work (1911)

From the Toronto Star Weekly, August 26 1911 Enterprise of the Household Economic Association Has Achieved Wonderful Results—Little Ones so Frail They Had to Be Carried on Pillows Have Been Bolstered Up Into Strength—Certified Milk Sold for Eight Cents a Quart, the Society Paying Difference Between Cost and Selling Price — Three Depots in Active Operation.…

Christian missions proselytized Jews in ‘the Ward’

From the Canadian Jewish News, April 2015 Having recently marked its 25th anniversary, the organization Jews for Judaism continues to counter the activities of missionary groups in Toronto that deceptively target Jews for conversion. However, Christian missions to the Jews are certainly nothing new in this city. In the era before the First World War, a…

Mount Sinai Hospital had humble beginnings

When Dr. Daniel Drucker of Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital receives the US$150,000 Manpei-Suzuki prize for groundbreaking diabetes research this February (2015), he will be only the latest in a long parade of medical researchers at the world-famous institution to be recognized for their excellence. A researcher engaged in a different sort of quest — probing…

Michael Blume, Toronto’s first Jewish pharmacist (1866)

From The Jewish Standard, April 1, 1966 The author, in an earlier article, wrote of the career of Mr. Charles Kahn, Toronto’s first Jewish dentist. The following article deals with the first Jewish pharmacist in Toronto and discloses hitherto unknown material in the history of Jewish life in Old Toronto. At just about the time…

Toronto’s first Jewish nurse writes of early Toronto

Original Mt Sinai Hospital, Yorkville Ave., Toronto, 1934

Memoirs of Dorothy Goldstick Dworkin In the following article, the former Dorothy Goldstick relates her experiences working as a nurse and midwife in Toronto’s fledging Jewish community from 1907 to 1911, when thousands of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and the Russian Pale were arriving in the city each year. Below, Dworkin profiled in 1968;…

Book reviews: a police procedural and a medical procedural

With the Eaton Centre and Scarborough block party shootings in Toronto, and the Dark Knight and Sikh Temple shootings in Colorado and Wisconsin, gun crimes have been screaming from the headlines all summer. Seems a perfect time, then, to look at Robert Rotenberg’s third police procedural crime novel, Stray Bullets. As he demonstrated in his…

Toronto by night: a bakery and a hospital (1884)

Toilers of the Night, Part II The People Who Don’t Go to Bed Until Sunrise From The Toronto World, May 9, 1884 Interior, Toronto General Hospital, 1913. CTA F1231-it207b The majority of men working in city bake-houses are not, strictly speaking, employed all night. About 3 a.m., or a little later, as the printers begin…

The Doctor’s Office: A Secretary’s Memoir

From The Canadian Jewish News, January 14, 1999 Ruth Mather, who for 44 years was secretary to Dr. Sidney Carlen, Toronto’s first Jewish cardiologist, has written a tribute to his pioneering and sensitive medical practice. It is an unvarnished and historically accurate account of the Jewish doctors who started their practices in Toronto in the…

Neurosurgeon maintains busy schedule at 63 (2000)

Dr. Charles Tator, one of only 160 neurosurgeons in Canada, still finds time in his 110-hour work week to canvass a few cards for the United Jewish Appeal. Tator, 63, the only living neurosurgeon to hold the Order of Canada, performs 150 to 200 brain and spinal cord operations a year. Brain tumors and spinal…