Dr. Neil Fraser Duncan

Neil Fraser Duncan was born in Edmonton in 1925 and grew up in Garneau. Inspired by his family paediatrician, he studied medicine at the University of Alberta, graduating in 1949, and trained further at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago before joining the paediatric department of Edmonton’s Baker Clinic.

In 1954 he began investigating heart disease in children, becoming Alberta’s first paediatric cardiologist. He chaired the Baker Clinic’s management for fifteen years, became the founding Director of the Division of Pediatric Cardiology at the University Hospital in 1973, and held outreach clinics in Red Deer, Yellowknife and communities across the North. He was a professor emeritus of paediatrics at the University of Alberta.

He was President of the Northern Alberta Children’s Hospital Society, formed in 1979, and helped create the Northern Alberta Children’s Hospital Foundation, now the Stollery Children’s Hospital Foundation. After years of campaigning, the Stollery Children’s Hospital opened in 2001.

At First Presbyterian Church he served as an elder for nearly thirty years: the Kirk Session photographs list him in 1968, 1982, 1991 and 1996. He died on December 7, 2021, in his ninety-seventh year.