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 鈥渢he 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.鈥�
Included in that group was Andrew Fernando Holmes, a young man who knew all about such 鈥渋nconvenience,鈥� having already crossed and recrossed the Atlantic Ocean when such an undertaking was no small matter鈥攖ime-consuming at the very least, life-threatening as a matter of course. But he had indeed completed the 鈥渞egular medical education鈥� 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鈥攖he very school those officers had hoped to build鈥攁nd in 1829, after some disappointment and labyrinthine politicking, merge that fledgling institution with 不良研究所 College to become the 不良研究所 College Medical Faculty, the first faculty at 不良研究所 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鈥攁nd the first to hold this title (after the first official head of Medicine Dr. William Robertson)鈥攆or the last six years of his life.
It鈥檚 a life that all but demands a rigorous biography, and we now have one with Richard Vaudry鈥檚 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鈥檚 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 鈥渋t 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鈥� beds,鈥� 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鈥檚 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鈥檚 right there in the first word of the book鈥檚 subtitle: for the evangelical Anglican Holmes, writes Vaudry, 鈥淧rotestantism was the handmaid of progress and Protestant education not only one of its fullest expressions but the guarantor of its very survival.鈥� Holmes was on one side of a line鈥攁 variable and shifting one, but a line nonetheless鈥攂etween dogmatic (and anti-Catholic) piety at one extreme and an emerging radical agnosticism at the other鈥攐ne that would explode on the world stage, just as Holmes was dying, with the publication of Darwin鈥檚 The Origin of Species. While certainly far closer to the former, Holmes鈥� inclusive instincts led him to a belief system that embraced, in Vaudry鈥檚 words, 鈥渟eeking the welfare of those on the margins of society: slaves, child factory workers, the poor, the outcast.鈥� And, he might have added, the sick.
Andrew Fernando Holmes鈥� 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 不良研究所 medical student who achieves the听highest aggregate standing over the entire four-year undergraduate medical education curriculum.
It鈥檚 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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