Blossom Wigdor

Life and career

Wigdor (née Temkin) was born in Montreal, Quebec on June 13, 1924. Her parents were Russian Jewish immigrants. She earned an undergraduate degree from McGill University in 1941.

She married engineer Leon Wigdor in 1945 and moved to Toronto. She completed a master's degree in psychology from the University of Toronto, under the supervision of Mary Louise Northway.

Wigdor worked as a clinical psychologist in Toronto's Sunnybrook Hospital in the 1940s, then at Montreal's Queen Mary Veterans' Hospital.

She returned to Montreal to in 1947 and began her PhD at McGill in 1949. After earning her PhD in clinical psychology in 1952, she taught at the university for another 27 years. She continued her clinical work during this time, and was named chief psychologist of Queen Mary Veterans' Hospital in 1961.

At McGill, Wigdor developed an interest and specialization in gerontology. At the suggestion of collaborator Donald O. Hebb, she studied the cognitive development (including intelligence and memory) of older adults.

Wigdor joined the University of Toronto in 1979 and became the founding director of its gerontology program, the first at a Canadian university.

In 1989, Wigdor's book, The Over-Forty Society: Issues for Canada's Aging Population (co-written with economist David Foot), was published. The book examined the impacts of an aging population on Canadian society.

In 1990, Wigdor was named chair of Canada's National Advisory Council on Aging. The same year, she oversaw the official opening of the Centre for Studies of Aging at the University of Toronto, of which she was its director from 1989 to 1991.

Wigdor retired in the 1990s and became a professor emerita at the University of Toronto.

Her husband, Leon, died in 1991. Wigdor remarried in 2002. She died in Toronto on October 25, 2025, at the age of 101.