Canadian Female Physicians

Canadian neurologist, educator, scientist, astronaut and photographer Roberta Bondar CC OOnt FRCPC FRSC is noted as the first female astronaut and the first neurologist of Canada to travel into space. She flew as part of the Space Shuttle Discovery mission STS-42 and performed over forty experiments in Spacelab. She later served as head of an international team of researchers at NASA.

The current Canadian Minister of Crown–Indigenous Relations, Carolyn Bennett is also a qualified physician and has been a public health minister earlier. The Liberal Party of Canada member has also taught medicine at the University of Toronto and been part of several medical boards.

Suzanne Mallouk ran away from her Canada home and moved to New York, where she took up odd jobs to finance her art career. She supported a penniless Jean-Michel Basquiat grow into a wealthy artist and became a muse for his paintings. She later became a practicing psychiatrist.

Emily Stowe created history by becoming the first female doctor to practice in Canada and the second to receive a physician’s license in the country. A champion of women’s education, she was also a prominent suffragist and assisted in building the first women’s medical school in Canada.

Former WHO director-general and one of Forbes’s most powerful women, Margaret Chan was both applauded and criticized for her decision to cull Hong Kong’s entire poultry stock in 3 days to control the H5N1 virus in 1997. She was also in charge during the 2003 SARS outbreak in the city.

Maud Menten was a Canadian bio-medical and medical researcher. She made several important contributions to enzyme kinetics and histochemistry. She studied medicine at the University of Toronto, becoming among the first women in Canada to earn a medical doctorate. She collaborated with Leonor Michaelis to come up with the Michaelis-Menten equation model.

Apart from founding the humanitarian organization War Child Canada, Canadian physician Samantha Nutt has worked with children in war-torn areas such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Congo, and Somalia. She has also penned the bestseller Damned Nations: Greed, Guns, Armies and Aid and is a regular on news shows.