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TI: I'm curious, by being of Japanese ancestry, was that ever a hindrance or a help in your career in, as a plastic surgeon?

HS: Well, I don't know if it was a hindrance or a help. I, I was, all the time was at, with Walter Mackenzie in University of Alberta, I was treated like any other resident. If I did my job and did it well, he felt that I, he would reward me with giving his effort to do the best he can, because he wanted us to be in a position where we could really do something worthwhile in medicine. 'Cause he was thinking in terms of what was gonna happen to the medical school. Its development in Canada, the medical school in Alberta, over the years had developed a pretty good reputation in comparison to Toronto and Montreal, that were the, the big guns. He never took, he was never, like he said to me, says, "I can get you into the best plastic surgery residency in the United States, but I can't do that in Canada. Toronto and Montreal are closed as far as you're concerned." They were, just, it was just too difficult to try and push into those areas. "But I can do," he said, "I can get you into the best place in the States," and sure enough he did. And I got into Pittsburgh, when I came back from my training in Pittsburgh, there was another fellow, I joined him as an associate, he was two or three years ahead of me, Mac Alton. He was, he was trained in England, and he did a bit of work in (Montreal) and a bit of work in New York, but he came back mainly English-trained. I was American-trained, and the two of us, he said, he wanted to start a division of plastic surgery at the University of Alberta. This would become probably the first division of plastic surgery east of the Great Lakes. Everything else had been in Toronto and Montreal You didn't have a training center in western Canada where you could get your own residents and get your own training.

By 1967 -- I came back, I left in '60 to go to Pittsburgh, came back in '62, and by '65, we had a division. And we trained our first resident in plastic surgery at the University of Alberta. And the interesting thing is he happened to be Japanese. Not Japanese born in Canada, Japanese born in Japan, who had gone to the States, did research, and then became an, became, originally, became an American citizen, and then came to Canada and did research in Canada, and became a Canadian citizen. And we took him on as, as our first resident. The second guy was a guy from England who came and trained with us. And it wasn't 'til the third person that we got a real Canadian in terms of a guy who was born in Canada, and we trained him.

<End Segment 57> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.