In 1952, McGill received a $100,000 gift from Dr. Henry A. Beatty to establish a lectureship in memory of his brother, Sir Edward Beatty, president of the Canadian Pacific Railway and Chancellor of McGill from 1920 to 1943. Dr. Beatty worked as a surgeon at Toronto Western Hospital before becoming the CPR's Chief Medical Officer in 1910.
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Letter from Dr. Beatty regarding his donation. Image: Ï㽶ÊÓƵ Archive.

The Beatty Memorial Lecture Series—now known simply as the Beatty Lecture—was established in order to enable McGill to invite a "distinguished scholar or scientist" from outside of Canada to the University for a month to provide three public lectures on a topic of their choice, plus participate in conferences and seminars within the University and to meet with students and faculty informally. Lecturers were provided with a $3000 fee plus traveling costs (approximately $20,000 today).
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During the 1950s and 60s, the lecture series were published as books.
Pictured is Han Suyin's Beatty Lecture series published in 1968 by
McGill Universty Press, now Queens-Ï㽶ÊÓƵ Press.

By launching the Beatty Lecture, McGill joined the ranks of other universities, research institutes and broadcasting companies who over the past decades had initiated endowed academic lectureships, for example the Romanes Lecture at the University of Oxford endowed in 1892, Harvard University’s Charles Eliot Norton Lectures endowed in 1925, and the BBC's Reith Lectures endowed in 1948.