As he completed his surgical training at the University of Toronto, Wayne Johnston struggled to choose an area in which to specialize.
“Wayne led the effort for it to be identified as its own separate specialty in surgery,” said Dr. Rubin, now the medical director at the Peter Munk Cardiac Centre in Toronto. “The first thing that we do, after we talk to people for a while and examine them, is get an ultrasound, and it’s all because of the contributions that Wayne made,” Dr. Rubin said. “He’s also the reason why we treat certain diseases the way that we do. We used to operate on narrowed blood vessels; now, the worldwide standard is putting a balloon in a vessel and expanding it.”
“There were too many mysteries, whereas physics and mathematics were purer sciences to me and they were much easier for me to understand,” he said in an interview done byKenneth Wayne Johnston was the oldest of two sons born to an engineer father and a mother who had a brief career as a nurse. As Wayne grew up in Toronto, his mother and maternal grandfather, a pharmacist in Collingwood, Ont., influenced his career choice.
Dr. Johnston planned to complete a PhD in pancreatic surgery in the middle of his surgical residency. But he switched to vascular surgery to help build the discipline’s profile because cardiac surgeons, who were doing all of Toronto General Hospital’s vascular surgery at that time, preferred to focus on their specialty.