Will McWhinney

Conversation with Ian McWhinney.

In an important and provocative editorial, Dr Roger Ladouceur, my colleague at Canadian Family Physician, lamented the decline of generalism among family physicians, including many recent graduates.1 In response to this editorial, Thomas Freeman and Stephen Wetmore challenged our discipline and our national College2 to confront this emerging identity crisis in family medicine.3 In the great tra...

What would an Ian McWhinney health care system look like?

Medicine is an art of translation: physicians absorb a world of diagnostic frameworks and population-based guidelines, and translate them down to the level of a single person whose illness is but one piece of life and whose profile never quite matches the one in the textbook. Family medicine in particular, with its holistic and longitudinal approach so beautifully articulated by Ian McWhinney, ...

The gentle radical: ten reflections on Ian McWhinney, generalism, and family medicine today.

Ian McWhinney conceptualized and described the philosophical foundation of family medicine in a way that family doctors never fail to recognize.1 At the core of Dr McWhinney’s vision was the belief that the family physician was medicine’s consummate generalist. From the opening paragraphs of A Textbook of Family Medicine2 to early work in the peer-reviewed literature,3-5 the generalist theme is...

Reflecting on Dr. Ian McWhinney.

I am of an age now that the first section of the newspaper I turn to in the morning is the obituaries. On October 1, I read with great sadness of the death of Ian McWhinney on September 28. I only met Dr McWhinney twice, although his writing has been a touchstone for me in my career as a family doctor. The first time I met him was about a decade ago when he gave a talk to a group of colleagues ...

Assessing clinical discoveries.