Dr John Burgess was awarded the Order of Canada for his services to the Inuit and his teaching and research at McGill University. In Doctor to the North he chronicles his remarkable career, from the early influence of his physician father, to his medical training at McGill, in the US, and abroad, to eventual roles as a professor of medicine and director of Cardiology at Montreal General Hospital.

For several weeks a year, over three decades, he worked as a consulting cardiologist in the Canadian North, a first-hand witness to rapidly changing disease patterns among the Inuit as a Western lifestyle became more prevalent. Through the stories of some of his Inuit patients, Burgess presents a broad spectrum of heart diseases and discusses how they can be prevented.

Doctor to the North provides a unique insight into the making of a heart specialist, researcher, and teacher. It also serves as a history of health care and heart disease in the Canadian Inuit and a cardiology treatise for present and future health care workers.