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
