John Wishart (surgeon)

John Wishart (1850 to 1926) was a Canadian surgeon and pioneer medical educator. He was the first professor of surgery at the University of Western Ontario and a pioneer of surgical teaching in Canada before the Flexner Report; some of his lectures survive as student notes in the university library. He resigned after 27 years as Professor of Clinical Surgery, possibly because of Flexner's negative comments about the school, and was a founding fellow of the American College of Surgeons. Wishart was educated at the University of Toronto at the same time as William Osler. In 1874 he assisted Abraham Groves in one of the first operations to use modern aseptic technique, and in 1886 he performed an appendectomy, making him an early practitioner of that operation. He published early articles on several procedures, including nephrectomy and strangulated inguinal hernia. After leaving the university he became the founding surgeon-in-chief of the newly built St Joseph's Hospital in London, Ontario.