Dr. Eric Shepherd plays trombone in the London Citadel Band

Officially, Dr. Eric Shepherd is retired, but you wouldn't know it. At 73, Shepherd still spends two days a week in the operating room, assisting with surgery at Victoria Hospital in London, Ont., and he considers it a privilege.

“It's technically interesting, it's useful and I'm with my friends doing what I love,” he says.

Shepherd has been in the medical profession since 1963. Originally drawn to medicine by his interest in living things, he was fascinated by the surgical techniques involved in urology, which focuses on the urinary tracts of males and females, and the male reproductive system.

“Urology is a forerunner in endoscopic, or minimally invasive, surgery,” he explains. “With these techniques, we could remove a gall bladder, for example, through a scope instead of making an eight-inch incision.”

Shepherd was part of a team of doctors who established a dialysis program and a kidney transplantation program in London. Over the course of his career, he estimates that he has performed hundreds of transplants and thousands of other surgeries. But he's quick to insist that he's no hero.

“The world is made up primarily of people who get up in the morning and go and do the jobs they were trained to do,” he says. “I'm happy to have been able to do that.”

Still, Shepherd has had to go beyond his training from time to time and make difficult decisions.

“One of my happiest moments as a doctor was when I made a decision not to operate on a young man who had been hit by a truck and clearly had a damaged kidney,” he remembers. “The rule at the time said that the kidney should have been operated on, but it was my feeling that to do so would mean that the kidney would simply be lost.

“In the end, the young man remained stable and the kidney was able to heal itself and then function,” he continues. “That came to be the accepted way of managing that sort of injury, but it was contrary to the current way of thinking.”

Looking back on his experiences, Shepherd emphasizes the value of a team effort when it comes to a patient's health.

“It's very important to respect what other people bring to the table,” he says. “When I was finishing my internship, I was asked by a family doctor to take over his practice, and I told him that I would be terrified to sit in that office, wondering what was going to come through the door next. A family doctor is supposed to pick up on early cancer, high blood pressure, diabetes, a stroke that's about to happen—in the middle of treating coughs and colds. In medicine, each contribution is just one brick in the building.”

Outside of work, Shepherd applies the same principles to life at London Citadel, where he has been an active member for most of his life. Involvement at The Salvation Army has been central to his life and family—his father was bandmaster at the corps for many years and his brother is now a retired officer.

“I had a very firm grounding from my parents,” says Shepherd, who still plays trombone in the London Citadel Band and has served on corps council in the past.

As his faith has matured from childhood, he says that interactions with patients—particularly fellow Christians—have played a significant role, being at times encouraging and other times corrective.

“Those who were steadfast in their faith were a comfort,” he says, “and those who, despite their faith, were unpleasant made me look at myself to be sure that I wasn't that kind of example.

“The most important lesson I've learned is that the image is far less important than the substance of an individual.”