Jacob Langer

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Jacob C Langer, MD (b. 1956) is a Canadian pediatric general surgeon and medical researcher at the Hospital for Sick Children (Toronto) (SickKids). Langer is also a professor of general surgery at the University of Toronto and holds a surgical post at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. He is best known for successfully separating Zimbabwean conjoined twins in 2005, a case that made national and international headlines and was called "a small miracle" by the Globe and Mail. In 2014, Langer was one of 30 physicians named as "Toronto's Best Doctors" by Toronto Life magazine.

Early life and education

Langer is a second-generation Canadian, born in Toronto to Dr. Bernard Langer (surgeon), a prominent general surgeon at Toronto General Hospital who is a member of the Order of Canada for leadership and innovation in the medical profession, and Ryna Langer (nee Manson), a librarian. He attended the Alternative Independent Secondary School, which later became Avondale Alternative Secondary School, in high school, and studied pure mathematics at the University of Waterloo for one year, briefly considering a career as a folk musician before entering medical school at the University of Toronto. After graduating with his MD, Langer completed his residency and further training at SickKids.

Career

Following his medical training, Langer completed research fellowships at the University of California, San Francisco and McMaster University, funded by the Ontario Ministry of Health, the Medical Research Council of Canada, and the McLaughlin Foundation. Dr. Langer was Assistant Professor of Surgery and Pediatrics at McMaster University and a pediatric surgeon at the McMaster Children's Hospital from 1989 to 1992.

In 1992, Langer was recruited to the United States, to become Associate Professor of Surgery and Pediatrics at Washington University in St. Louis and a pediatric surgeon at St. Louis Children's Hospital from 1992 to 1999. He returned to Canada in 1999 to become Professor of Surgery at the University of Toronto, and Chief of the Division of General and Thoracic Surgery at SickKids, a position he held until 2012. He was also the inaugural holder of the Robert M. Filler Chair in Pediatric Surgery at SickKids.

Langer's areas of research and expertise involve surgical and non-surgical management of prenatally diagnosed congenital anomalies (in particular, abdominal wall defects and congenital diaphragmatic hernia), the development of new ways of managing children with Hirschsprung's disease, inflammatory bowel disease and other intestinal disorders, and new advances in the field of minimally invasive pediatric surgery, including laparoscopic surgical techniques and fetal surgery, a growing area of practice in which life-threatening congenital abnormalities may be fixed surgically while the fetus is still in utero.

In 1995, Langer was named Innovative Scientist of the Year by the St. Louis Academy of Science, and in 2007 was named the Canadian James IV traveling fellow. In 2014 he was awarded the Detweiler fellowship from the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada.

Along with his work as a pediatric surgeon, Langer is also a mohel in the Reform denomination of Judaism.

Conjoined twin separation

Since 1999, Langer has performed a number of surgeries pro bono in collaboration with the Herbie Fund, an international nonprofit organization based at SickKids that provides lifesaving surgical procedures to children living in poverty worldwide.

In 2004, a Toronto Ob/Gyn colleague, Dr. Rachel Spitzer, was working with pregnant women at Howard Hospital in Zimbabwe when the hospital's chief medical officer, Dr. Paul Thistle, identified a set of omphalopagus conjoined twins still in utero whose condition was likely to cause serious complications and eventual early death if they were not carefully separated. Spitzer delivered the twins in July of 2004; within 24 hours of their birth, Spitzer and Thistle had contacted Langer, who persuaded the Herbie Fund to provide the necessary funding for the surgery. The twins, Tinashe and Tinotenda, were then flown to Toronto in December along with their mother and a local nurse-midwife as support, with the help of The Salvation Army along with the Jewish organization Ve'Ahavta and many individual donors from the community.

On March 7, 2005, after several months of focused care, nutritional supplementation and surgical preparation, Langer led a team of 25 medical professionals - two general surgeons, two plastic surgeons, two anaesthesiologists, eight nurses and a large team of medical residents - in a complex five-hour surgical procedure to separate the twins. The procedure was successful.

In July 2005, once they were sufficiently recovered from surgery, Tinashe and Tinotenda returned to Zimbabwe with their mother. A CTV News update in 2016 on the twins' condition showed them healthy and thriving.

Leadership

• President, Canadian Association of Pediatric Surgeons (2012-14)

References

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