To Change the World

The ninth of fifteen children in a small town in Maharashtra, India, Chandrakant Shah managed to attend medical school through diligent study, sometimes under an oil lamp. He arrived in Canada in 1965, where he joined the School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. In Canada he was immediately struck by the inequities in health and social services for the underserved and the Indigenous populations. Throughout his professorship, he worked tirelessly to draw attention to the plight of these populations and to existing inequalities in Canada's institutions. He also made important contributions to the teaching of public health in Canada and wrote the first comprehensive textbook on the subject that is now in its sixth edition.