John G. FitzGerald

John Gerald "Gerry" FitzGerald (December 9, 1882, in Drayton, Ontario – June 20, 1940) was a Canadian physician and public health specialist who was instrumental in the control of diphtheria, first by producing and freely distributing antitoxin, and then in 1924 by using mass production to enable widespread use of the vaccine devised by Gaston Ramon.

He initially studied psychiatry, and did internships at Johns Hopkins Hospital and Sheppard Pratt before becoming the clinical director and chief pathologist of the Toronto Asylum for the Insane in 1907, where he worked under Charles Kirk Clarke.

[2] In 1913, he became an associate professor of hygiene at the University of Toronto, in which position he prepared Canada's first locally-made rabies vaccine,[3] and in early 1914, he used money from his wife's inheritance to found the University of Toronto Anti-Toxin Laboratories (renamed Connaught Laboratories in 1917), where he produced diphtheria antitoxins distributed without charge (funded by the Ontario government): "within reach of everyone".

"[5] That same year in the physiology laboratory two floors above FitzGerald's Connaught Labs office, Frederick Banting and Charles Best under the auspices of John Macleod successfully extracted insulin from the pancreas of dogs, fetal calves, and adult cows.

[6][7] In particular, Banting's experimental work with calf pancreas tissue took place at Connaught's farm site, where calves were involved in smallpox vaccine production.