Montreal born Leon Katz was a pioneering biomedical engineer whose work significantly improved patient care and safety throughout Canada.
Katz invented, innovated and hand-crafted a wide range of medical devices: one of the first fetal monitors, a scanner-printer to detect radioactive iodine uptake in the thyroid gland, infant incubators, and a high-speed contrast injector for angiography, etc. He operated these new devices in countless clinical procedures. Notably, using his own original heart-lung bypass machine, he was the perfusionist for Canada’s first successful open heart surgery, and for thousands of subsequent operations.
Katz served as the first chief of the Diagnostic Devices Division and Evaluation and Standards Division in the Bureau of Medical Devices in Ottawa. At Health Canada, he established ground-breaking legislation with regards to medical devices. His team’s discovery of hazards in blood collection led to international recalls of tainted equipment and saved countless lives.
Katz was named an Officer of the Order of Canada, a Member Emeritus of the Canadian Medical and Biological Engineering Society and a Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada, which he helped to found. He received the Order of Ontario and the Living Legend Award from the World Society of Cardio-Thoracic Surgeons. He was also a decorated WWII Veteran, who was an officer in the British Army, in the American Zone, and assisted the Jewish Brigade—the only military unit in the Allied forces to serve as an independent, national Jewish military formation.
Katz met his wife, Ruth Gottlieb, when they were both on their way to work on kibbutzim in Israel in 1949. They married in Montreal the following year. Over the course of their 65 year marriage, they had four children: Michael, Geoffrey, Floralove and Shelley.
