Maurice McGregor, OC (born 24 March 1920) is a South African-born cardiologist, academic leader and public policy advocate who has had a major impact on the practice of medicine, working largely from his base at McGill University in Montreal in the late 1950s into the second decade of the 21st century.
[3] Returning to Johannesburg after World War II, he met Margaret Becklake, a newly graduated medical doctor whom he married when they both started postgraduate work in London, England.
[1] When McGregor and Becklake returned to South Africa to practise in the early 1950s – he as a cardiovascular specialist and she as a respirologist (later an epidemiologist) – they found that the situation in their country had deteriorated due to the entrenchment of apartheid.
[6] Within this service, McGregor studied less invasive ways of measuring cardiac output in children, in collaboration with Paul Sekelj, inventor of one of the first whole-blood oximeters that could be used clinically.
His university leadership roles occurred during a period of widespread protests in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including a doctors’ strike in the fall of 1970 over the advent of national health insurance, a policy that McGregor supported then and since.
[12] They wrote about witnessing surgery done under acupuncture anesthesia and about research presented to them on that subject, noting the "paucity of up-to-date first-hand reports in the English language" and the importance "that this work be recognized in the West.
"[11] In 1984, the University of Witwatersrand (Wits) approached McGregor with a request to return to South Africa – then in the throes of turbulence surrounding the dismantling of apartheid – to be dean of medicine.
For instance, in a piece published on 16 April 1967 in the New England Journal of Medicine, McGregor outlined his opposition to the indiscriminate boycott of all South African educational institutions, pointing out that some of them were in fact developing non-white academicians.
[20] In February 2017, the Canadian Medical Association Journal published McGregor's point-by-point rebuttal to a stance taken by a deputy editor in favor of public and patient representation in designing clinical research trials.
[22] In conferring the Order of Canada on McGregor in 2010, the Governor General called him “an exceptional teacher and role model” for his “lifetime of outstanding achievement, dedication to community and service to the nation.”[2] Three years earlier, his wife, Margaret "Margot" Becklake, had been similarly recognized for her "outstanding contributions to fighting lung disease through research and education for more than 60 years.″[23] The couple raised two civic-focused children: James McGregor, an urban planner who focuses on affordable housing and ending homelessness,[24] and Margaret McGregor, a family physician and health policy researcher in British Columbia who focuses on care for the elderly.