Dr. Dale Greene travelled to many parts of the world, including Afghanistan, to work as a war and trauma surgeon.Donna Logan
Not content with the challenge of working as a surgeon in his native Canada, Dale Greene sought out adventures abroad, accepting missions to work in war zones around the world, often with inadequate equipment and under harrowing circumstances.
For two decades, Dr. Greene worked as a war and trauma surgeon with Médecins sans frontières (Doctors Without Borders), the International Medical Corps and the International Committee of the Red Cross. During one of his five visits to Afghanistan, faced with a patient who needed eye surgery following a land mine explosion, Dr. Greene called Canada and asked his partner, Donna Logan, to read from a medical textbook while he took notes. She asked if he was nervous. "Yes," he said, "but I don't have a choice. There's no one else." The surgery was a success.
Dr. Greene frequently operated in appalling conditions. The lack of modern equipment he encountered on missions in Third World countries made even routine procedures extremely difficult. Dr. Greene's solution was to scour bookstores for old medical texts to learn how procedures had been performed in the past. He would photocopy pages to pass along the information to his Third World counterparts.
In addition to coping with the danger and substandard facilities, Dr. Greene had to contend with local politics and beliefs. In the early 1990s, he took a position at a hospital in Zaire (now known as Democratic Republic of the Congo), a country bordering Rwanda, where there were ethnic tensions between Tutsis and Hutus. A Tutsi anesthetist refused to assist Dr. Greene because the patient was Hutu. Dr. Greene appealed to the hospital administrator to intervene. The administrator, also a Tutsi, sided with the anesthetist. Disgusted, Dr. Greene packed his bags and left. It was the only time in his career that he didn't complete a mission.
Whether he was repairing cleft palates, treating burns, or cobbling together prostheses for land-mine victims, Dr. Greene brought enormous compassion to his work. Along the way, he became a Buddhist, viewing death as merely a transition. His own death took place on April 28 at Gulf Coast Medical Center in Fort Myers, Fla. The cause was coronary artery disease. He was 73.
Buddhism was far removed from Dr. Greene's Protestant Sunday school upbringing. He was born Mitchell Dale Greene in Ottawa on May 22, 1941. For 10 years, he was the only child of Grace and William Greene, a teacher who became a civil servant. His mother, a real estate agent, suffered from tuberculosis, so she delayed getting pregnant again. Ten years after her first son was born, she gave birth to a second, then, 10 years later, a third.
During summers spent at a remote cottage with his mother, Dale assuaged his loneliness by immersing himself in books. After he graduated from Nepean High School, his sharp, analytical mind led him to study mathematics at Queen's University. He earned his B.A. in 1963. He decided to study medicine next, graduating three years later. In the mid-1960s, he married Phyllis McKenzie, an English teacher. His son Christopher was born in 1967, followed by a daughter, Allison, in 1970.
Although his medical practice in Mississauga thrived, he felt something was missing. Dr. Greene was intrigued by the emerging field of plastic and reconstructive surgery, so he resumed his education, enrolling in the University of Toronto's Gallie Course, a postgraduate program in surgery. In 1974, he became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in Canada. His expertise was soon in demand.
From 1975 to 1987, he served as a staff surgeon at the Mississauga Hospital (now Trillium Health Partners). His busy practice in reconstructive surgery led him to establish the first operating room located outside a hospital setting in the west Greater Toronto Area. Meanwhile, he was also on call at five hospitals.
By this time, he was amicably divorced and parenting his children on weekends. Son Christopher remembers leaving movies several times because his father's pager went off. He and his sister would wait for their father in the doctors' lounge or, occasionally, view a procedure in the operating theatre. The all-consuming stress of juggling work and family finally proved unmanageable for Dr. Greene. In 1987, he sold his practice and wondered what to do next.
Always a lover of travel, he took a sabbatical in France. While there, through friends, he learned about MSF. The idea of working in exotic locales and helping those who might not otherwise have access to medical care held great appeal. Dr. Greene joined the organization and was sent to the south of France to refresh his skills and learn the principles of war surgery. This meant dealing with trauma while working with whatever tools were at hand, often in isolation. Each mission lasted from three to six months, after which he would return to Toronto emotionally and physically exhausted.
By the late 1990s, his partner was Donna Logan, a journalist and broadcaster turned academic. She said Dr. Greene revived himself by reading voraciously, playing bridge on his computer, keeping fit and indulging his passion for sailing. She helped him overcome his one great fear: public speaking. Together, they worked on presentations and speeches. "He received numerous requests from students, media and charitable groups," she said. "He found it difficult to speak in public but he did it because he believed so deeply in what he was doing."
Once, during an interview with a major American TV network, Ms. Logan said, Dr. Greene was embarrassed to find his eyes filling with tears as he recounted the pain and suffering he'd seen. "Although he often talked about his work as if anyone could do it, that clearly wasn't the case," Ms. Logan said. "Many, many times he stated that he got back as much as he gave."