Jackson was credited with bringing the field of arthroscopic surgery – a less invasive way of tending to joint injuries – to the Western world.

The arthroscopic method, developed in Japan in the 1960s, has been used thousands of times in professional sports since the 1970s to treat knees of footballers, athletes and baseball players.

But Jackson, the team doctor for Canada's Olympic team at Tokyo in 1964, will be best remembered for his role in helping create the worldwide Paralympic Movement.

He was the first president of the Wheelchair Sports Association of Canada, which he founded in 1967 and laid the foundations for the creation of the Canadian Paralympic Committee.

He was also Canada's first wheelchair team to a World Championship and was President of the international Stoke Mandeville Games.

In 1976, Jackson organised the Toronto Olympiad for the Physically Disabled, a nine-day event featuring more than 1,500 athletes from 40 countries that at the time was called the Torontolympiad and which cost $1.5 million (£912,000) to organise.

Until then, the Games for the disabled were for athletes in wheelchairs.

But in Toronto, the fifth Paralympics and first held in Canada, blind and amputee athletes participated.

"It was a pretty big turning point in our movement," said Bob Steadward, who was head of the Canadian delegation at the Games.

Steadward said that "remarkable change" of bringing three diverse disabled athletic organisations together led to discussions with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) about making Paralympians full partners in future Games.

By 1984, athletes with disabilities were competing in demonstration events at the Winter and Summer Olympics.

Four years later, in Seoul, Paralympians for the first time used the same venues as those built for the Olympics.

In 1989, the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) was created, with Steadward its first President.

"It's an organisation governed and structured by sport, not disability," said Steadward.

"Toronto was where those world bodies started coming together."

Jackson was modest about his role in the Paralympic Movement but passionately believed in what he was doing.

"It goes back to the concept of ability, not disability," he said in an interview published last month.

"It was a time when people were generally uncomfortable around anyone who had a disability.

"But if you see someone who's in a wheelchair or blind or an amputee and they're racing, throwing and doing things on an athletic field, then surely they can come into your office and put in an eight-hour day."

Rick Hansen, one of Canada's best known Paralympic athletes who won at gold medal in the 800 metres in 1980, led the tributes to Jackson.

He said: "He was just a real common-sense leader who made things happen.

"He made an incredible contribution."