Dr. Ray Wiss is recognized across Canada and internationally as the man who introduced ultrasound into Canadian emergency medical practice. His teachings have reached several thousand Canadian emergency physicians and this has transformed the way emergency medicine is practiced in our country. He has been described as being the most influential emergency physician in Canada in the past decade.
Dr. Wiss, who grew up in Sudbury, Ontario, followed a rather eclectic path to medicine, which included stints as an Infantry Officer in the Canadian Forces, Director of Recreation in a maximum security institution, and paramedic in a third-world war zone. Somehow, he managed to make this sound like a coherent career path to the interviewers at McMaster Medical School and to the Emergency Medicine Specialization program at McGill University.
Because of his prior military background, Dr. Wiss followed the deployment of Canadian troops in Afghanistan very closely. The more he heard and read, the more he became convinced that the Canadian Forces’s mission in Afghanistan was an example of a very rare thing: a moral war. He therefore re-enlisted with the Canadian Forces for the express purpose of supporting the Afghan mission.
Dr. Wiss, now Captain Wiss, arrived in Afghanistan in early November of 2007. He quickly integrated himself into the medical team, who had been unaware to that point about his former service in the combat arms. Upon learning of this, they asked him if he would be willing to undertake a much more dangerous mission than the one to which he had originally been assigned: to serve at the Forward Operating Bases where the fighting takes place. Captain Wiss agreed to do so, and ended up spending more time in the combat area than any other physician since the Afghan mission began.
FOB Doc: A Doctor on the Front Lines in Afghanistan is a formal publication of the diary Captain Wiss kept during his time in Afghanistan.
Since returning from Afghanistan, Dr. Wiss has continued to teach nationally and internationally, and re-joined the team at the Sudbury Regional Hospital Emergency Department. He lives in Sudbury with his wife Claude and their four-year-old daughter, Michelle.
Read an excerpt from FOB Doc here.
