Kingston doctor shocked when he heard World Medical Association´s new president plagiarize his speech `word for word`
(The Star Science)

Dr. Chris Simpson was sitting in a conference room in Reykjavik, Iceland listening to the inaugural speech of the World Medical Association’s new president, when the words started sounding a little too familiar.Simpson is a past president of the Canadian Medical Association and said he knows the importance of a president’s first address, after giving deep, personal reflection to the inaugural speech he wrote as CMA president in 2014. Last Friday, it was Dr. Leonid Eidelman’s turn to deliver his talk before members of the international association, created in 1947 to uphold the medical ethics of physicians around the world. Ultimately, Dr. Eidelman’s speech led to the CMA’s resignation from the World Medical Association. Last weekend, the Canadian delegation discovered Eidelman’s speech plagiarized Simpson’s CMA speech and an official call for Eidelman’s resignation was voted down. “Part of this is in hindsight, but throughout a lot of the speech he was delivering there were some themes that he was talking about that I remember thinking, well that sounds kind of familiar,� said Simpson, a cardiologist and vice dean of the Queen’s University School of Medicine.“He talked about the ‘social contract’ which is a very Canadian term and I used that frequently in my speech as well, but I didn’t think anything of it other than it was just generally familiar,� he said, in a telephone interview from Iceland.“But when he began a series of sentences, I knew two sentences in. I said, ‘That’s my speech.’ I said it out loud to people sitting beside me. And then I started citing it along with him as he was reading it. I was talking out loud, the same words.�A spokesperson for the World Medical Association said Eidelman later apologized before the assembly. In an email, the spokesperson said Eidelman told the association that his speech was translated from ...