It is with sadness that we announce the passing of Dr. Peter Harvey Pinkerton, who died peacefully on March 21, 2025, at the age of 91, at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto.
He was born Feb. 14, 1934, in Glasgow, Scotland. Peter was a lifelong academic, a dedicated physician, a hobby historian, a competitive swimmer and an avid golfer. Peter's early life in Glasgow was shaped by a family deeply rooted in education and medicine. His mother, the daughter of a successful timber merchant, had a master of arts from the University of Glasgow, and was a strong supporter of the rights of women. Peter's maternal uncle was a surgeon. His father was also a physician, having started practising as a "country physician" and retrained in the newly developing field of anesthesiology in Glasgow. Peter was an avid golfer (playing his first game at St. Andrews at the age of 11) and sportsman (rugby, swimming and water polo). He graduated from the University of Glasgow's faculty of medicine in 1958, with the Macewen Medal in Surgery and numerous wins in swimming at national and international competitions.
In 1958, he started at the Western Infirmary in Glasgow as a house officer. He then obtained a prized position in medicine at Oxford at the Radcliffe Hospital. During a half-year gap between Glasgow and Oxford, he took a position as the "ship doctor" on the SS Prome sailing to Burma (and back), stopping in Genoa, Port Said, Port Sudan, Aden, Colombo and Rangoon. In 1963, after four years at Oxford, he returned to Glasgow as a lecturer in Hematology. In 1965, he took the Buswell fellow and visiting assistant research professor in the faculty of medicine at the Buffalo Hospital (travelling by freighter ship with a few private passengers, his golf clubs and sadly leaving behind his prized MGB). He spent his time in Buffalo researching hereditary anemias in mice and iron metabolism.
In Buffalo, he was introduced to his lovely future wife, Mariane Barbieri. In 1967, he moved to Toronto, brokering his own new department of laboratory hematology at Sunnybrook, where he would stay on for the next 40 years. He made huge contributions across the whole department, but he always had an incredible loyalty to transfusion medicine. He was always at the front of the pack to modernize — the first to switch to immediate spin crossmatch, the first to implement automation, the first to computerize the laboratory, making Sunnybrook the centre of excellence it is today for transfusion medicine.
He also continued his golfing habit, despite the Canadian weather, with "iron rounds" on his weekly summer schedule on Friday afternoons. He published his first paper in 1961 in the Scottish Medical Journal and his last paper in 2024 in the International Journal of Thrombosis and Hemostasis. He published on a wide range of topics: the history of transfusion medicine, blood utilization, transfusion medicine errors, hemovigilance, automation, flow cytometry methods, cytogenetic abnormalities in hematological malignancies, proficiency testing, iron metabolism, congenital hemolytic anemias and iron deficiency. He was part of the transfusion medicine "Scottish Mafia" that reshaped the transfusion landscape in Canada. He contributed to the discovery of Hemoglobin Sunnybrook and Hemoglobin Köln, and published five editions of the Provincial Transfusion Handbook for physicians, "Bloody Easy." He helped countless individuals advance their careers in laboratory medicine, hematology, transfusion medicine and medical technology. He provided decades of leadership at both Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and the University of Toronto. Peter was a founding member of the board of directors of Canadian Blood Services and brought both his clinical and his administrative thought leadership into that role at a crucial time for the blood system in Canada.
He was predeceased by his beloved wife, Mariane (2013); and survived by his two daughters, Toni and Sandra; and five grandchildren, Devon, Samantha, Derek, Andrew and Jillian.