In October 1822, a group of medical officers of the Montreal General Hospital assembled to draw up a mission statement that might hopefully lead to the founding of a medical school in the city. Among the reasons such an establishment was urgently needed, they noted, were “the great difficulties which the student of medicine in this country has to encounter before he acquires a competent knowledge of his profession; knowing the great inconvenience resulting to many from the necessity at present existing of spending several years in a foreign country to complete a regular medical education.”
Included in that group was Andrew Fernando Holmes, a young man who knew all about such “inconvenience,” having already crossed and recrossed the Atlantic Ocean when such an undertaking was no small matter—time-consuming at the very least, life-threatening as a matter of course. But he had indeed completed the “regular medical education” he had gone to Scotland and France to pursue, and was set on a path that would see him help found the Montreal Medical Institution—the very school those officers had hoped to build—and in 1829, after some disappointment and labyrinthine politicking, merge that fledgling institution with McGill College to become the McGill College Medical Faculty, the first faculty at McGill and the first faculty of medicine in what would become Canada. He would remain there until his death in 1860, having been Dean of the Faculty—and the first to hold this title (after the first official head of Medicine Dr. William Robertson)—for the last six years of his life.
It’s a life that all but demands a rigorous biography, and we now have one with Richard Vaudry’s multifarious Andrew Fernando Holmes: Protestantism, Medicine, and Science in Nineteenth-Century Montreal (University of Toronto Press, 390 pp), a book that positions its subject as a figure able to accommodate many seemingly incompatible currents at a volatile and revolutionary time in history, and as the product and beneficiary of a progressive, transatlantic world view.
Thomas Holmes, newly retired from the British army, decided in 1796 to emigrate with his family from strife-torn Ireland to Canada. On the way, the ship on which he, his wife and their first son were sailing was captured by pirates and taken to Cadiz, Spain, where Andrew was born in 1797 and lived in captivity until the family succeeded in getting to Lower Canada in 1802, settling first near Quebec City and finally in Montreal. The only remnant of Spain Holmes carried through his life was the middle name that must have looked quite exotic in 19th-century Quebec.
Vaudry has a solid instinct for narrative: he keeps things moving along, and in his deployment of period detail he’s happy to go beyond the range of the standard academic biography. We get a good sense of how it must have felt to be in Montreal when it was a small outpost without a single bookseller, and of the intellectual ferment of early 19th-century Edinburgh, a place where the hunger for medical learning was so keen that at the Royal Infirmary “it was a common complaint that the number of students who wished to attend on the wards was so great that many could not get close to the patients’ beds,” and university professors could make themselves rich in a system where medical students paid their fees directly to them.
As the best history books do, this one carries bracing reminders on every page of just how much the world has changed. Two hundred years ago doctors could attain a celebrity status for their work alone; the intellectual elite of Montreal, as Vaudry points out, consisted largely of physicians and clergymen. Consider, too, that the accepted Canadian medical apprenticeship system of the time, in which Holmes was paired with Montreal physician and surgeon Daniel Arnoldi for five years from age 14, looks a lot like indentured servitude from today’s perspective.
What might look strangest to 21st-century eyes, though, is how central a role religion played in the workings of the Montreal medical establishment of the 1800s. It’s right there in the first word of the book’s subtitle: for the evangelical Anglican Holmes, writes Vaudry, “Protestantism was the handmaid of progress and Protestant education not only one of its fullest expressions but the guarantor of its very survival.” Holmes was on one side of a line—a variable and shifting one, but a line nonetheless—between dogmatic (and anti-Catholic) piety at one extreme and an emerging radical agnosticism at the other—one that would explode on the world stage, just as Holmes was dying, with the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species. While certainly far closer to the former, Holmes’ inclusive instincts led him to a belief system that embraced, in Vaudry’s words, “seeking the welfare of those on the margins of society: slaves, child factory workers, the poor, the outcast.” And, he might have added, the sick.
Andrew Fernando Holmes’ legacy lives on in the name of the eponymous congenital heart malformation he was the first to document and in the Holmes Gold Medal, established five years after his death and still awarded annually to the graduating McGill medical student who achieves theĚýhighest aggregate standing over the entire four-year undergraduate medical education curriculum.
It’s always salutary to be reminded that long-established institutions owe their existence to the efforts of actual people. Vaudry has done that for what is now the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, and for Holmes.
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