Tommy Douglas had a dream. He wanted all Canadians to receive complete medical care without a price tag. Despite an uprising by Saskatchewan doctors, that dream became what we now know as medicare.

The idea of universal health care began with a leg injury. In 1911, when Douglas was just seven, he developed a nasty infection in his knee called osteomyelitis. His family was too poor to afford a private physician, and they were told the whole limb was going to have to be amputated. That never happened. Instead, a specialist offered to save the leg if Tommy would do volunteer work.

"Had I been a rich man’s son instead of the son of an iron molder," he later recalled, " I would have had the services of the finest surgeon, and would not have had to depend on chance for a cure. All my adult life I dreamed of the day when an experience like mine would be impossible and we would have in Canada a program of complete medical care without a price tag."

Douglas was born in Scotland in 1904 and immigrated to Winnipeg with his family in 1919. As a Baptist church minister in the 1930s in Weyburn, Sask., he witnessed the suffering of many during the Great Depression.

He soon decided to turn in his pulpit for politics and in 1935, he was elected the leader of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). In 1944, Douglas resigned his federal seat to become premier of Saskatchewan for the next 17 years. He then went on to become the national leader of the New Democratic Party until 1971.

Under his leadership, Saskatchewan became the first province to offer public, universal hospital insurance in 1947.

Then in 1962, one year after Douglas left Saskatchewan to lead the new federal NDP, the Saskatchewan government brought medicare into the province after a long fight with doctors.

On the first day it was launched, July 1, more than 700 doctors in Saskatchewan walked out in protest, calling the Saskatchewan Medical Care Insurance Act "compulsory state medicine." The job action lasted 23 days. By 1971, every province was taking part in the medicare system.

One man influenced by Douglas was Roy Romanow, now in charge of recommending how to shape the future of health care in Canada. He remembers listening to Douglas on the radio in debates in the legislative assembly.

"I remember Dad and I lying down in our small living room. All the lights were out in the house except he had a little radio with an orange light on it. It would light up the house and we would listen to the debates with Tommy Douglas. I was very much taken, even as a youngster, with the eloquence of Tommy Douglas," Romanow told The Medical Post.

In 1962, Romanow, a young law student in Saskatoon, got so fired up that he and a friend drove to Regina to support the government on medicare.

"Talk about a cauldron of a conflict. It was unbelievable," Romanow told The Post. "If there was anything that committed me to political life, the incident around medicare was it."