As a boy, Balfour Mount, MD’63, LLD’02, sometimes dreamed of a career as an artist, but he knew in his soul that his life would be bound to medicine.
“My father was a surgeon; my brother was a surgeon. It didn’t really occur to me there was anything else in life to do,” he once told an interviewer.
Balfour Mount duly graduated from Queen’s School of Medicine in 1963 and went on to post-graduate studies in surgery and urology at McGill University. He trained in surgical oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York before returning to work as a surgeon in Montreal.
Ten years into his career, Dr. Mount discovered something to do in life other than surgery. That discovery – the result of a panel discussion on Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s landmark book, On Death and Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy & Their Own Families – would ultimately lead him to abandon his surgical career and to bring palliative care to Canada.
His life’s work would improve the deaths of countless Canadians.
Dr. Mount died on Sept. 25, 2025, in the Montreal hospice that bears his name. He was 86.
“He advanced the principle that even patients with incurable illness, advanced illness, can still be healed in a lot of ways,” said Dr. Craig Goldie, Meds’08, a palliative care physician and co-chair of the Division of Palliative Medicine at Queen’s. “I think he should be remembered as someone who was very interested in and very appreciative of the value of the whole patient.”
Balfour Mount was born in Ottawa on April 14, 1939. His mother, Maude, was a trained nurse, while his father, Dr. Harry Telford Roy Mount, was a neurosurgeon.
Balfour was not a gifted student – as a boy, he struggled to read – but his drive and diligence carried him to Queen’s. Within a decade, he was firmly established in Montreal as a cancer surgeon, academic, and researcher.
Despite his busy schedule, in January 1973, Dr. Mount agreed to organize a discussion panel for his church about Kübler-Ross’s book, which examined the psychological impact of terminal illness and death.
Dr. Mount believed Kübler-Ross had little to teach him; he had often confronted death as a cancer surgeon and had also faced his own mortality as a cancer patient. At the age of 24, while still a surgical intern at Montreal’s Hôtel-Dieu Hospital, Dr. Mount was diagnosed with an aggressive form of testicular cancer that required surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation.
“It didn’t occur to me that I didn’t have a clue about death and dying,” Dr. Mount told an interviewer in 2005. “I thought, ‘I’m a doctor; I must know everything in the world about death and dying.’ But of course, I knew absolutely nothing.”
Kübler-Ross’s book explores the experiences of dying people, many of whom told the author about being left to die in hospital isolated and in pain. The book suggested too many medical professionals disengaged from patients when it became clear treatment had failed and death was imminent.
During the church discussion group, someone suggested a study be launched to understand if the situation Kübler-Ross described was an accurate reflection of what end-of-life care looked like in Montreal. Dr. Mount volunteered to lead the work, certain in his belief that the city’s hospital care would not be found wanting.
He enlisted two students to conduct a survey of terminally ill patients and their family members at Montreal’s Royal Victoria, a leading teaching hospital. The researchers found widespread suffering among the dying, with little attention paid to their pain control or the complex needs of their family members and caregivers.
“It became clear to me,” Dr. Mount said, “that to die in the Royal Vic was a catastrophe.”
To address the situation, he travelled to London in September 1973 to study the revolutionary end-of-life care offered by a London hospice described in On Death and Dying.
St. Christopher’s Hospice took a holistic approach to the physical, psychological, and spiritual needs of dying patients and their families. It also offered patients expert pain and symptom control through the use of morphine and other opioids that many doctors were then reluctant to prescribe, even to the terminally ill.
“Once I saw St. Christopher’s, I saw there were solutions to that unnecessary suffering,” Dr. Mount said. “It was evident to me that that was where I wanted to die.”
Back in Montreal, Dr. Mount launched a pilot project dedicated to the physical and spiritual needs of the dying in the Royal Victoria Hospital. The palliative care program took a multidisciplinary approach to end-of-life care and recognized the important work of nurses, social workers, chaplains, and personal support workers. It featured a home outreach service and a bereavement program for family members.
Within a year, the palliative care program – the first of its kind in Canada – became a permanent feature of the hospital. (Dr. Mount coined the phrase “palliative care” as an alternative to “hospice,” a word used in France to describe nursing homes.)
A few years later, Dr. Mount abandoned his career as a cancer surgeon to devote himself full time to palliative medicine. He considered it a moral imperative given what he said was the enormous suffering that could be addressed through an attentive, “whole-person” approach to the dying.
Dr. Mount founded and directed McGill University’s palliative care division and later helped establish the McGill Programs in Integrated Whole Person Care. He became a powerful evangelist for improved end-of-life care across the country and around the world.
For his work, Dr. Mount was made a Member of the Order of Canada in 1985. He was promoted to an Officer in 2003. “Considered the father of palliative care in North America, Balfour Mount is a model of compassion and humanity,” his citation reads.
Dr. Mount died in the palliative care unit named in his honour, the Balfour Mount Palliative Care Unit at the McGill University Health Centre, surrounded by family and friends.
