Ian Renwick McWhinney (11 October 1926 – 28 September 2012) was an English physician and academic known as Canada's "Founding Father of Family Medicine" for his work in creating a family medicine program at the University of Western Ontario.

After the war, he studied at Clare College, Cambridge and at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital at the University of London.

[1] He was inspired by particularly two articles, the work of James MacKenzie and a paper about postgraduate teaching in family practice in the New England Journal of Medicine.

These led him to author his first book, The Early Signs of Illness: Observations in General Practice in 1964 and then gain a Nuffield Traveling Fellowship in family medicine with Robert Haggerty at Harvard University.

In his last years, he worked tirelessly on his writings; his memoir, "A Call to Heal: Reflections on a Life in Family Medicine" (ISBN 978-1-927352-10-6) was published posthumously in 2013.