Gilbert Girdwood

Gilbert Prout Girdwood (1832 to 1917) was an English physician and surgeon who built his career in Canada. Born in Paddington, London, he trained at University College London and St George's Hospital, worked out with a London chemist a procedure for detecting strychnine in the human body, and joined the army as an assistant surgeon in the Grenadier Guards in 1854. Sent to Canada with his battalion in 1861, he left the army in 1864 to settle in Montreal, graduated from McGill in 1865, served as surgeon to militia units and as a city health officer working to prevent a cholera epidemic. He helped found the Society of the Montreal Hospital for Sick Children in 1869, taught practical chemistry and held the chair of chemistry at McGill until 1902. In 1896 he built an elementary apparatus used to radiograph ten patients, and from 1901 he headed the new radiology department at the Royal Victoria Hospital, making him a pioneer of radiography in Canada.