25 years later, the story of a Halifax hospital and a U.K. organ-hoarding scandal

On Jan. 18, 1998, Kent Dooley sat across from a brilliant pediatric pathologist with a devoted following at Halifax's IWK Grace children's and maternity hospital and told him he was fired.

The move by Dooley, the head of pathology and laboratory services, was bewildering to many outside the division.

"'I sure hope you have a good reason for this,'" Dooley recalls the hospital's head of obstetrics telling him later that day.

"'Yeah, I do,'" he replied. "'And I can't tell you what it is.'"

That polarizing moment, it later turned out, would save the hospital from the riptide of a macabre scandal that exploded less than two years later on the other side of the Atlantic.

It was revealed that the organs, including hearts and brains, from more than 850 infants were being stored in the cellars of a building used by the Alder Hey hospital in Liverpool, England, stripped from the bodies of dead children and stockpiled without their parents' consent.

At the centre of the scandal was pediatric pathologist Dick van Velzen, who had worked at Alder Hey between 1988 and 1995, before decamping for Canada and the IWK hospital.

It was a horror show for the parents of dead children at Alder Hey, a headline mill for the media, was named one of Time magazine's Top 10 scandals of the year, and suddenly meant the IWK faced many questions.

More than 25 years later, van Velzen's former IWK colleagues are speaking publicly about his two-year tenure at the hospital, describing in detail what led to his hiring, their creeping concerns about his work and ethics, and their decision to finally seek his dismissal.

They want the particulars of what happened put on the record, and co-authored a piece earlier this year in the Canadian Journal of Pathology. They also hope there are useful lessons to be drawn, not just about what went wrong, but also about what went right at the IWK. How instead of becoming another Alder Hey, the hospital faded into a scandal footnote.

Pediatric and perinatal pathologists broadly perform two kinds of work. One is autopsies on dead children to determine cause of death or whether an earlier diagnosis was correct. In the case of miscarriage, an autopsy can reveal crucial genetic information to parents.

The second aspect of their work is to examine tissue, such as from a tumour, removed from a living patient during surgery to help diagnose and treat diseases such as cancer.

The work is crucial. It's also exacting and detailed-obsessed, which is why lapses due to carelessness or hurriedness are egregious.

In the mid-1990s, the IWK, like many hospitals, was faced with a pediatric pathologist shortage and was desperately trying to recruit an experienced specialist to join three junior doctors.