Dr. James Alastair Carruthers, the pioneering physician who, together with his wife Dr. Jean Carruthers, discovered the cosmetic benefits of botulinum toxin A and played a pivotal role in making Botox a household name worldwide, passed away on Monday, August 19, after a strong fight with Parkinson’s disease, as announced by the American Society for Dermatologic Surgery (ASDS) and his wife’s Vancouver-based cosmetics practice, Carruthers Cosmetic.
The couple’s story is both heartwarming and inspiring, and it’s worth revisiting in Alastair’s memory. Jean, an ophthalmologist and cosmetic surgeon, trained under Dr. Alan Scott (dubbed the “father of Botox”), who discovered that injecting small amounts of botulinum toxin could block the muscle causing eye misalignment and, thus, correct squints without surgery. When Alastair later expressed frustration over the limited options available to treat his patients’ frown lines, Jean had an idea: to use the botulinum toxin treatment on his wrinkle patients.
Jean herself was the study’s first test participant. “If you believe in it, you’ve got to do it on yourself, right?” she told The Mirror in 2023. “It wasn’t scary because I had been using it for blepharospasm [eyelid muscle spasms] for years, so I knew the doses and I told Alastair where to put it.”
As a result, Jean’s frown lines disappeared. ““It was just wonderful to be able to show [prospective volunteers] my picture and say, ‘This is what I looked like before,'” she recalled to The Mirror. “After that they were keen on it! And that’s how we got our first 18 patients.”
“We put it all together as a paper and I presented it to the American Society for Dermatologic Surgery in 1991,” she continued. “It was a disaster. The room went dead with silence. A colleague came up to us afterwards and said, ‘That’s a crazy idea that will go nowhere.’”
As history would show, they were wrong. Dr. Scott sold the rights to Allergan, and not long after, “people started inviting us all over the world to teach it,” she said. The FDA approved Botox for treating glabellar lines in 2002.
Alastair’s career was marked by numerous accolades. He became the first Canadian President of the American Society for Dermatologic Surgery (ASDS) from 2006 to 2007, published over 100 articles, authored multiple textbooks, and received several prestigious honors. Today, he is survived by a loving family, including his beloved wife and partner, Jean.
