Dr. Gilles Julien

It was the early 1990s, in Montreal.

A pediatrician was knocking on the doors of the poorest families in the city. He asked for nothing. The visits were free.

His name was Gilles Julien.

He had been born on May 14, 1946, in Grand-Mère, Quebec.

He studied medicine at Université Laval and graduated in 1970. Then he trained in pediatrics at the Université de Montréal.

In 1974, he became head of pediatrics at the Hôtel-Dieu in Lévis.

But in 1981, he left for the Comoros.

There, he cared for very poor children. He saw them living with shortages and famines, without essential medical care.

It was the turning point of his life.

After that, he went north. From 1983 to 1990, he was in charge of health for the Inuit of Nunavik.

By day, he was a pediatrician. In the evening, he hosted a radio program on health.

Many Inuit children had ear infections. One child in four was deaf.

The infections came mostly from smoke, inside the houses.

He launched a prevention program. Deafness among the children was cut in half.

He also helped create a program of Indigenous midwives, one that respected Inuit traditions.

For Gilles Julien, a doctor's responsibility went far beyond the walls of the clinic.

Back in Montreal, he directed community health at Sainte-Justine Hospital, from 1991 to 1994.

And he began knocking on doors.

Little by little, people joined him. A school helped. A restaurant owner lent him an office. A nurse helped. A building owner gave him ten years of free rent.

That is how the first community social pediatrics centres were born, in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve and in Côte-des-Neiges.

In 1997, the first opened under the name Assistance d'enfants en difficulté. In 2004, a second, the Centre de services préventifs à l'enfance, opened in Côte-des-Neiges.

In these centres, the doctor is not alone. There are social workers, teachers, volunteers, sometimes police officers.

With his wife, lawyer and mediator Hélène Trudel, he devised a "protective circle" around the child. Law and medicine, seated at the same table.

Everything rested on a clear foundation: the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

In 2005, he created a foundation to promote social pediatrics. It later became the Fondation du Dr Julien.

In 2011, he was named an Officer of the Order of Canada and of the Ordre national du Québec. The Collège des médecins also gave him a humanism award.

He is considered the founder of social pediatrics in Quebec. His centres became models, far beyond Montreal.

His way of caring, weaving a circle around the child, has its own Quebec history. It echoes Ubuntu without merging with it: a child grows through all those who surround them.

What he built fits in one image. An open door in a neighbourhood. And behind it, a circle of people standing around a child.