Walking down the streets of Casablanca with his father in 1942, young Jacob Garzon saw something that would change the course of his life. It was graffiti on a wall threatening all Jews to leave Morocco. 

“Until that moment, even as the oldest of 10 brothers and sisters, I had no idea of the hatred in the hearts of some of my countrymen,” he now recalls.

He also had no idea that he would indeed one day leave Morocco, to dedicate his life to serving patients of all faiths as a beloved surgeon in a hospital half a world away. 

Today, sitting in an office at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal where he has just retired after 44 continuous years on staff, Dr. Garzon looks every inch the worldly senior surgeon, with his silver hair and impeccably tailored suit. He also still has the athletic build of a marathon runner and a former rugby player for the Moroccan international team.

His father always encouraged his sporting pursuits, but when a scout tried to recruit him for a professional team while he was studying medical school in Paris, the choice was clear. “Being the eldest son of a Jewish mother, it was either finish medical school or be killed,” he jokes.  

Returning to Morocco to pursue surgical training, any hope that being a star rugby player would be an antidote to discrimination soon evaporated: his first assignment was to a hospital for lepers. “At first, I felt like an exile among those shunned by society,” he says. But he came to realize that  compassion for those who are different is the best response to bigotry. 

This was best demonstrated one night he was on call alone in a small community hospital during his next rotation. Garzon vividly remembers the night “a young woman arrived on the back of a mule, bleeding to death from a miscarriage.” After operating on her to stop the hemorrhage, and finding the blood bank empty, he lay beside the patient and had a litre of his own blood transfused directly into her. 

That she survived is remarkable. Even more so, to the hospital workers and the community, was that she was a Muslim and her life had been saved by a Jew. 

The townspeople of Kenitra, Morocco, may have seen him as a hero, but as he continued his studies elsewhere it became clear that his future would be difficult in his homeland. In 1964 he, his wife Ruby and their two young children emigrated to Montreal. The process was expedited by the fact that another life he had saved was one of the passport officers!

Life was not any easier when he arrived. “Not only did I have to redo my years of surgical residency, but I remember one hospital rejecting my application as soon as they saw me fill out the box marked ‘Religion!’” 

He found acceptance and mentorship at the Jewish General Hospital, his professional home for the remainder of his career. Ironically, his experience with endemic diseases in Morocco would help bolster his reputation as a rising star. His favourite example is when he won an argument with a more senior surgeon on how to operate on a patient whose tuberculosis had infected his spine. “It didn’t hurt that I had published my medical thesis in Paris on this very subject!” 

Fast-forward 20 years, to 1990. At a career phase when most doctors are enjoying the comfort of being at the peak of their skills, he decided to retrain himself in a completely new technique. Laparoscopic cholecystectomy –  removing the gallbladder through tiny incisions with videogame-like instruments held outside the body – had recently been developed as a means to markedly decrease postoperative pain and accelerate recovery. 

Thus, as he wryly notes, “pigs were sacrificed in the Jewish hospital for the first time – for   practising the technique in a research lab!”

Soon after, he introduced the practice clinically and began teaching it to colleagues. The explosion of applications for minimally invasive surgery and, most recently, robotic surgery at the hospital is all an evolution of this pioneering work. For this and his many other contributions, Garzon was awarded the Médaille de l’Assemblée Nationale du Québec in 2007.

Although still energetic and vowing to catch up on family time, Garzon has retired from practice after a hand injury that he feels has left him with less than perfect dexterity.  This is the ultimate example of a lifelong, uncompromising approach to technical excellence. But to all those he has treated and worked with through the years, he is remembered even more for his charm, warmth and genuine caring. 

This devotion to providing excellent care while respecting others, forged so long ago while working as an outsider in a small hospital in Morocco, is perhaps his greatest legacy. 

When asked to sum up the most valuable lesson of his career, Garzon pauses, looking down thoughtfully at his hands for a moment. “I always believed the most important thing was technical excellence. But so is caring about those around you.” n

Kenneth Kardash is a staff anesthesiologist at the Sir Mortimer B. Davis Jewish General Hospital and associate professor of anesthesiology at McGill University in Montreal. He has worked with Dr. Garzon for over 20 years.