Honorary Degree Recipients
Stanley Read
Stanley Read (’65 MD) was raised in the village of Bashaw, Alberta. After high school, he went to the University of Alberta and graduated from Medical School in 1965. Following his internship, he completed a PhD in Microbiology and Immunology at McGill(’70) and pursued postdoctoral training at the Rockefeller University in New York studying the streptococcus and the pathogenesis of Rheumatic Fever. This research took him to Trinidad and other countries in the Caribbean, the introduction to many years of health promotion in countries in the region.
Read left a staff position at Cornell University in New York to join the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto in 1980 where he later became Chief of Infectious Diseases. He also worked in STI clinics in New York and Toronto and noted unusual infections, mainly in gay men, later found to be due to HIV/AIDS. Read and his colleagues designed and carried out the first study of the natural history of HIV infection.
In 1987, Read saw his first AIDS case in a child. His compassion for these children changed the course of his career, his research and his life’s mission. One of the early Pediatric HIV specialists, Read’s focus was on the prevention of transmission of the virus from mother to child. He established the HIV/AIDS Family Centered Care Program at Sick Kids in 1988.
He was also an active volunteer in the wider AIDS community, treating adult patients at a Toronto clinic, helping set up Casey House, the first palliative care facility in Canada, and Chair of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Canadian Foundation for AIDS Research.
Read promoted the development of HIV/AIDS Programs in Canada, Russia, Ukraine and the Caribbean. In the Bahamas, where for many years he was Consultant in Child Health to the Ministry of Health, Read’s work helped reduce HIV transmission from mothers to babies from 30 per cent to near zero within five years. A global health leader, Read is helping an AIDS-free generation become a reality throughout the world.
University of Alberta Senate Donation
The University of Alberta Senate is donating the following volume to the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library to commemorate the awarding of an honorary degree to Mr. Stanley Read:
Louis Fischer. Diseases of Infancy and Childhood: Their Dietetic, Hygienic, and Medical Treatment. Philadelphia: F. A. Davis, 1907.
This is a first edition copy of an authoritative early work on medical care for children by American pediatrician Louis Fischer (1864–1944), one that was so extraordinarily popular that the title was reissued eleven times between 1907 and 1928. Dedicated to German pediatrician Adolph Baginsky (1843–1913), this weighty tome (of 979 pages) features more than 300 half-tone and full-colour illustrations, and is bound in the original maroon blind- and gilt-stamped cloth. Divided into twelve sections, the text explores a wide range of pediatric topics from newborns to nutrition and from respiratory disease to abnormal growth. Since early medical texts were actively used, sometimes by successive owners, they rarely survive in such good condition. This title will be an excellent addition to the growing collection of medical texts housed in Bruce Peel Special Collections.
Honourable Sheila Greckol
Sheila Greckol graduated from the University of Alberta with a BA/LLB in 1975, followed by articles with the Court of Appeal of Alberta. For 25 years, she practiced labour and human rights law with a firm that became Chivers Greckol and Kanee. Appointed to the Court of Queen’s Bench in 2001 and the Court of Appeal in 2016, she served as a justice until retirement in 2022. Highlights of Sheila’s legal career include advocating for 2SLGBTQ equality in the Vriend case, for abortion rights and the Morganthaler clinic to help secure safe access to abortion, for paid maternity leave, and for trade unions’ constitutional right to strike.
As a trial judge, Sheila presided over criminal and civil matters, and was appointed to hear applications brought for medically assisted death in northern Alberta pending changes to the law. She was appointed a deputy Judge in Nunavut, where she volunteered as a trial judge in small communities across the eastern arctic. In 2012, on sabbatical at the University of Alberta, she wrote on restorative justice in sentencing Indigenous offenders and the need for Indigenized courts on First Nations.
As a member of the Alberta Court of Appeal, Sheila had the opportunity to consider current legal issues with broad impact on the community including justice in sentencing for indigenous Indigenous offenders, the constitutionality of federal environmental legislation, and justice for women faced with intimate partner violence.
Throughout her career, Sheila has been involved in continuing education, including at the University of Alberta Law School, and with the National Judicial Institute in its work training judges in Canada as well as internationally, in Ukraine, Chile, Peru, Jamaica, and Korea. She has received awards for her work nationally, provincially, and in Edmonton, including the University of Alberta Distinguished Alumnae Award in 2018.
Currently, Sheila volunteers with Alberta Immigrant Women and Children’s Center, an organization helping newcomers with a particular focus on the needs of women and children. She and her husband, Bruce Hagstrom, enjoy Edmonton’s rich cultural scene, a close-knit community of family and friends, and travel to far-away places.
University of Alberta Senate Donation
The University of Alberta Senate is donating the following volume to the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library to commemorate the awarding of an honorary degree to Honourable Sheila J. Greckol:
Eleanor Roosevelt. On My Own. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1958.
This first edition copy of Eleanor Roosevelt’s (1884–1962) memoir covers her life after the death of her husband, Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945), opening with a scene of the author riding down “in the old cagelike White House elevator that April morning of 1945 with a feeling of melancholy” (1) and concluding on the final page with some thoughts on leadership: “What the world wants today is leadership in the true sense, and we had better decide what we want to achieve and then go ahead and do it—do it as leaders and not as imitators” (234). Roosevelt wrote two memoirs that preceded this one, This Is My Story (1937) and This I Remember (1949), and in 1961 all three books were published together by Harper & Brothers in The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt. The author portrays her work as the first Chairperson of the United Nations’ Human Rights Commission in chapter eight of On My Own, describing it as “my most important task” (71). This copy is warmly inscribed by Roosevelt in black ink on the half title page, below the printed title, to an earlier owner of the book. The dust jacket features a colour photograph of Roosevelt by master of portrait photography, Yousuf Karsh (1908-2002).