About
A Surgeon's Life.
I was born in Sicily and grew up between stone courtyards, small-town memory, and the long discipline of study. My father was a Carabiniere, my mother a housewife; the house I grew up in was poor in things and dense with language.
I trained as a doctor in Catania in the 1970s, then moved to the States, United Kingdom, and to Canada, where I spent most of my working life. For over two decades I practiced and taught vascular and endovascular surgery at McMaster University and at the University of Toronto, where I built and led one of Canada's largest thoracoabdominal aortic surgery programs. I directed international endovascular training courses, earned a Master of Science in Health Research Methodology, and held medical licenses in five countries across four healthcare systems.
In 2016 a stroke interrupted that trajectory. What followed — the months of rehabilitation, the return to the operating theatre in a new country, the work of understanding what had happened to me as both patient and surgeon — became one of the spines of the book I eventually wrote.
I returned to Italy, to Catania, and continued to operate. But somewhere along those years I began writing. Not for publication at first — just to understand. The habit grew. The writing found its form. And now, in quick succession, three books have come out: a volume on medical ethics written from the surgeon's perspective and published by Springer; a memoir called The Weight of Precision on the life of a surgeon between faith and flesh; and a biographical novel, Aurora in Sicily, that traces my father's century-long life as a Carabiniere across twentieth-century Sicily.
What the three books share, I think, is an attempt to sit honestly with the tensions that surgery forces on those who practice it: between technical precision and human fragility, between the silence of the body and the noise of what we owe each other, between what a life asks of you and what it gives back.
I live in Catania with my companion Mariagrazia. Our three children — Isabella, Margherita, and Davide — live and work abroad, in Brussels, Toronto, and Vancouver.
Academic & Professional Biography
Claudio Salvatore Cinà, MD, MSc (HRM), FRCSC, is a vascular and endovascular surgeon currently practicing at the Laboratorio del Movimento in Catania, Sicily.
He graduated in Medicine and Surgery from the University of Catania in 1978 and completed surgical training across five countries — Italy, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the Netherlands — and has held medical licenses in each, including in Texas and Arizona in the United States. He is a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Canada (1989) in both General Surgery and Vascular Surgery, and holds a Master of Science in Health Research Methodology from McMaster University (2000).
He was formerly Full Professor of Vascular Surgery at the University of Toronto and at McMaster University, Associate Professor of Health Policy Sciences at the University of Toronto, and Associate Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at McMaster University. He was Chief of the Division of Vascular Surgery at St. Michael's Hospital, Toronto. He developed and led one of Canada's largest thoracoabdominal aortic surgery programs — first at McMaster University in Hamilton, where he ran the program for over a decade, then continuing and expanding it at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto. He also directed the PIVOTAL international endovascular training course.
Recent Books
— Medical Ethics: The Surgeon's Perspective (Springer Nature, 2025)
— The Weight of Precision: A Surgeon's Life in the Space Between Faith and Flesh (2025)
— Aurora in Sicily: The Carabiniere and the Sabre (2025)
His peer-reviewed publications span vascular surgery, epidemiology, surgical education, and medical ethics. For peer-reviewed publications and clinical work, see arterievene.com, ResearchGate, and Google Scholar