In Memoriam Ronald Aldous

Ron Aldous, sixty-seven, died of carcinoma of the kidney on Sunday, July 8, 2001. This was the same disease that took his mother when Ron was sixteen.

Although we met at the Montreal General Hospital back in the early 1960s—Ron, a psychiatric resident, and I, a rotating intern—it was not until he and his family moved to Calgary in the early'80s that we became close friends. What I admired most in him was his honesty and commitment to whatever he was doing. He was a questioner. No dogma was accepted without careful scrutiny, whether religion, politics, or psychoanalysis. Such an approach often got him into hot water, but his quest for living an honourable life always prevailed. He reminded me of Sir Thomas More in Bolt's A Man for All Seasons: a man with strong principles, regardless of the consequences.

He came from a passionately religious family, and subsequently Ron inherited the same passion when it came to patient care. Ron's education started out in a one-room schoolhouse. Scholastically he excelled, and when he graduated from Queen's, he captured seven prizes, including the Gold Medal in Medicine and a prize for having the highest standing throughout the medical course.

While in residency, he and Shirley went off to Nigeria for a year as part of a medical mission. Typically, he both innovated and challenged while there. After residency, he practised in Montreal, and for a number of years ran the Home Care Service at the Montreal General. He eventually went into psychoanalytic training, qualifying in 1974. During his psychiatry and psychoanalytic training, his beliefs were challenged and he stopped believing in exclusivity.

When Ron joined the Western Branch, he did so with gusto. It was he who challenged us to present a seminar series in psychoanalytic concepts, first in Calgary, then in Edmonton, and eventually that tradition was taken along to Vancouver, where the bulk of our Western Branch now resides. But it was not only psychoanalysis that interested him. He