Iceland honours paediatric cardiologist Stanton Perry with Order of the Falcon

Icelandic President Halla Tómasdóttir awarded paediatric cardiologist Stanton Perry the Knight’s Cross of the Order of the Falcon at Bessastaðir this week, mbl.is reports. He was honoured for his invaluable work for children with heart conditions in Iceland.

Perry carried out numerous complex cardiac catheterisations on children in Iceland and did not accept payment. Children are normally sent abroad, including to the United States, for such procedures, at a cost of millions of Icelandic krónur.

Perry studied medicine at the University of Iceland after meeting his former wife in Kansas, where she was an Icelandic exchange student. He later returned to the United States, specialising in paediatrics in St Louis and cardiology in Boston.

“As I told the president yesterday, I have always felt that I owe Iceland more than Iceland owes me,” Perry said. He was speaking in Icelandic by telephone from an aircraft at Keflavík Airport, before beginning a long journey to his home in California.

Perry is mostly retired but occasionally works for Stanford University. He said the cardiac procedures in Iceland should not be credited to him alone, naming cardiologists Hróðmar Helgason, Gunnlaugur Sigfússon and Kristján Eyjólfsson as colleagues.

“I feel that they did much more than I did. It is a great honour to receive the order, but I do not know how much I have done. There are probably more people who deserved it before me,” he said.

Perry has four children living in Iceland and the United States: anaesthesiologist Tjörvi Ellert, general practitioner Ylva, artist Sölvi Stein and Tristan Stone. Tristan is his child with his current wife, Rupa, who attended the ceremony with him.