McGill dean of medicine made Guinness Book of Records
Returned to Princeton for a science degree that he thought he’d completed 52 years earlier
ALAN HUSTAK
The Gazette
Sunday, May 13, 2007
Patrick Cronin, a former dean of medicine at McGill University who was internationally recognized for his work in the Third World with the Aga Khan Health Services Foundation, will be remembered at a memorial service in the McGill University chapel on May 30.
Cronin, a cardiologist, died of pneumonia on Jan. 17 in Montreux, Switzerland, at the age of 80.
“He was dedicated to being a good doctor, but he wasn’t effective one-on-one. He didn’t want to pander to rich patients,” said his son, David.
“He was much better as an administrator and understood that if you got the ball rolling in the right direction, you can make things happen.”
As one example, it was Cronin who is credited with initiating an exchange program between local doctors in Nairobi, Kenya, and McGill University in the early 1960s.
“Can you imagine even suggesting this in the 1960s, and getting a board to approve such a program?” David Cronin remarked.
Robert Francis Patrick Cronin was born in London, England, on Sept. 1, 1926.
He was the second of three boys in the family of renowned Scottish novelist Archibald Joseph Cronin, a doctor who gave up a medical practice of his own to write fiction.
Among A.J. Cronin’s best-known works is The Keys of the Kingdom, about an idealistic young doctor; it was made into an Oscar-nominated movie in 1946.
When the Second World War began in 1939, the Cronins moved to Greenwich, Conn., and young Patrick was sent to Portsmouth Abbey School, a private boarding school in Rhode Island.
At the age of 16, he was accepted in a science program at Princeton University. The following year, he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force and trained as a tail gunner. When the war ended, he was sent to England to help with reconstruction. In 1945, claiming to have had the necessary credentials from Princeton, Cronin enrolled in medicine at McGill and was accepted on the assumption that he had completed his studies.
It later turned out that, because he was a British subject, he wasn’t entitled to an equivalency certificate from the U.S. university. By then, he was already a cardiologist and a clinician at the Montreal General Hospital, but the fact that he had never finished his science degree nagged at him.
In 1972, Cronin was appointed McGill’s dean of medicine.
“He brought dignity and savoir faire to the position, and was able to resolve conflicts with rival departments,” said Samuel O. Freedman, who succeeded Cronin as dean in 1977.
“What he did have was a sense of McGill as one of the leading medical schools in North America, and he imparted that sense to the Third World, where everything he did was on the McGill model. He was, I believe, also the only dean in the history of the department to balance the budget and still have a little left over.”
Cronin worked with the Canadian International Development Agency and the Osler Medical Aids Foundation, today known as the McGill International Health Initiative.
While still dean of medicine, he was recruited by the Aga Khan, imam of the world’s Ismaili Muslims, to oversee the construction and operation of hospitals in Karachi, Pakistan, and Tanzania – and to set their curriculum for schooling medical personnel.
Ismailimail 