Ronald Weiss was disciplined and determined, personal qualities that he applied to his first love of music—and then to his medical career. He was affectionately known as the “Wayne Gretzky of Vasectomies,” performing 58,789 procedures.
Colleagues estimated that he performed more vasectomies than any other doctor in the Western Hemisphere.
Weiss retired in 2021 after he was diagnosed with glioblastoma—the same aggressive form of brain cancer that claimed Canadian musical icon Gord Downie. Weiss outlived the initial 15-month prognosis and continued to enjoy an extraordinarily active life for four years, learning Spanish, travelling, and writing and performing music.
He died in Toronto on Oct. 24 at age 68.
Weiss grew up in Montreal and was the middle child of five boys. His father owned an electrical business and was the main contractor for Expo 67. Just before the October Crisis in 1970, his father abruptly moved the family to Vancouver, concerned with their future after the rise of the FLQ. Ron was 14. A year later they moved again from Vancouver to Toronto. Weiss earned a diploma from the assertively experimental Toronto Free School, and headed back to Vancouver.
“By the end of high school he was searching for direction,” his brother Peter said. “He and I lived together for a year when I was at UBC. He was taking time off. I would come home from classes and walk into our apartment and hear him playing the Bartok pieces for children on the piano. It was at this point that his determination and discipline really became apparent.”
Without his parents’ knowledge, Weiss had been busking and performing at open mic gigs, playing guitar and reading poetry with other teenagers who congregated around Toronto’s Church of the Holy Trinity.
In Vancouver, he started practicing up to five hours a day for almost two years with the idea of going to the Berklee College of Music. He focused on his health and his diet, exercising every day and starting every morning with yogurt, granola and berries, two routines that he kept until he died.
In April 1977, Weiss decided to take a break and return to Montreal. Within days he met Debbie Halton. “He told me he was marrying me, and he never went back to Vancouver,” she said.
“Once he met Debbie and determined that he was going to be with her the rest of his life he started to think about an appropriate way to support himself and his wife and his family,” his brother Peter said. ‘He didn’t really think music was a career path.”
He initially moved to Ottawa to work with his father who owned a very successful hardware store called Rankin’s. At the same time, he wanted to keep his options open and get high school credits in biology, physics and chemistry in case he decided to go to medical school. He commuted every weekend to visit Debbie who was finishing a social work degree at the University of Western Ontario in London.
He married Debbie in 1980 and started his B.Sc. at University of Ottawa. Debbie was working full-time as a social worker. In 1986 they had their first child, when he was a 30-year-old medical school student. Their second child arrived when he was starting his residency.
Weiss graduated and they settled in Ottawa where he practiced family medicine until 1991 when a patient talked to him about vasectomies. There was a new Chinese method that had been introduced in the United States but not in Canada. Weiss brought Dr. Philip Li, who pioneered the surgery, to Canada and Ron refined his technique creating the ‘No needle/no scalpel non-surgical vasectomy.’
“Ron was truly exceptional—an inspiring figure both in his field professionally and to those who knew him personally,” Li told The CJN.
The vasectomy practice had specific requirements and needed dedicated staff which he felt was impacting the family medicine practice, so Weiss and his wife opened a clinic in their home on Clemow Avenue in Ottawa.
Not only was it more efficient from a business perspective to run the clinic from his home, but it also allowed Weiss flexibility to play music.
“The routine was he’d get up at 5:30, exercise, get the computers and everything in the office ready. He’d do 14 vasectomies, finish around 1 p.m., come back upstairs, eat, have a nap and do music for the next three hours. That was the new standard routine,” his wife said.
The atmosphere at the office was happy and fun. As they reached milestone numbers, starting with the 20,000th vasectomy, patients were given surprise gifts. Every thousandth patient received a bottle of wine and every 5,000th was a bigger gift. Men came from across the country—including a hockey team from Peterborough, Ont., wearing T-shirts that announced “We’ve been Weiss-ed.”
“I was his partner at the office, and he was my partner in the volunteer world,” his wife Debbie said. The couple agreed when she left her social work career to work in the office that she would also pursue volunteer work, which led her to take a leadership role in the Jewish community of Ottawa.
“We went to Israel for two months when he was doing an elective during med school in the mid-1980s. It was Ron’s introduction to Israel, and I was very concerned because Israel was the love of my life. But we arrived and the love was shared. Truly it was our love of Israel that brought us together as a family Jewishly,” Debbie said.
They returned a few years later when Weiss was doing his residency in 1988 and spent two months on Kibbutz Nahal Oz (one of the kibbutzim attacked on Oct. 7).
Weiss also volunteered doing vasectomies when he and Debbie travelled. “We’d go to the Philippines or India for the week and do a few thousand vasectomies.”
“Beyond his medical brilliance, he was a perfectionist and a remarkable musician, qualities that showed in everything he touched,” said Li. “His legacy is far-reaching, and his impact is indelible.”
Weiss is survived by his wife of 45 years Debbie Halton, his children Jessica, Joshua and Lauren, his grandchildren and his brothers Peter, Don and Jason. He is predeceased by his brother, Erik.
Ron Weiss uploaded some of his original songs to YouTube including “In the End,” which he produced a music video for in May 2024:
