Coeditor appointed Nuffield Professor of Surgery

Jonathan L. Meakins

As many of you will have heard, my coeditor at the Journal, Dr. Jonathan Meakins, has accepted the position as the Nuffield Professor of Surgery at Oxford University. Although all Canadian surgeons can take pride in the fact that one of “ours” has been nominated for and accepted such a prestigious chair, I am sure all of you join me in lamenting his loss to Canadian academic surgery.

I first met Dr. Meakins when, as a young surgeon at the University of Toronto, I travelled with many of my colleagues to visit McGill University on a program of planned visits organized by D.R. Wilson, then Chairman of the Department of Surgery at the University of Toronto. Dr. Wilson believed that the Department could learn a good deal by visiting distinguished surgical departments of other North American universities, and I was fortunate enough to be included in the visit to McGill.

From that early association, Dr. Meakins and I met periodically (although rarely) at meetings of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada until I was invited to become coeditor of the Canadian Journal of Surgery in July 1996. Dr. Meakins was already established as the “senior” editor at the Journal; he believed that the established concept of dual editorship for this journal should be continued but that the surgical interest of the “second” editor should reflect the increasing diversity of the Journal and not be restricted to the specialty of general surgery. Accordingly, an orthopedic surgeon came to be a coeditor — a first for this journal.

Over the past 6 years I have enjoyed working with Dr. Meakins on each issue of the Canadian Journal of Surgery. Although ably assisted by the many other members of the editorial staff and the Editorial Board, Dr. Meakins has been largely responsible for the academic content of the Journal and its intellectual direction and has planned and executed such innovative features as Surgical Biology for the Clinician.

He has taught me a great deal about what is necessary to edit a comprehensive surgical journal and what is required on an ongoing basis to continually upgrade the academic excellence of such an enterprise.

Dr. Meakins is expected to resign as coeditor of the Journal in 2003; his replacement is yet to be named. All of us at the Journal hope that the transition will be orderly and that his successor will be named in short order so that the 3 of us — Dr. Meakins, myself and my new partner — will be able to manage this change in a positive fashion by obtaining all the benefits of a new editor while keeping all the attributes of the old and experienced one.

I wish Joe Meakins well in his new position, thank him for his contributions to Canadian surgery and in particular thank him for his contributions to the Canadian Journal of Surgery.