Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae was a Canadian poet, physician, author, artist and soldier during World War I, and a surgeon during the Second Battle of Ypres, in Belgium.
19 Facts About John McCrae
2.
John McCrae is best known for writing the famous war memorial poem "In Flanders Fields".
3.
John McCrae's famous poem is a threnody, a genre of lament.
4.
John McCrae's father had seen action during the Fenian raids, and was a member of the Guelph city council and a director of The North American Life Assurance Company.
5.
John McCrae attended the Guelph Collegiate Vocational Institute but took a year off his studies due to recurring problems with asthma.
6.
John McCrae was a resident master in English and Mathematics in 1894 at the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph.
7.
At medical school, John McCrae had tutored other students to help pay his tuition.
8.
John McCrae was first a resident house-officer at Toronto General Hospital, then in 1899 at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland.
9.
In 1900 John McCrae served in South Africa as a lieutenant in the Royal Canadian Artillery during the Second Boer War, and upon his return was appointed professor of pathology at the University of Vermont, where he taught until 1911; he taught at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec.
10.
In 1905, John McCrae set up his own practice although he continued to work and lecture at several hospitals.
11.
John McCrae was the founding member of the University Club of Montreal.
12.
John McCrae treated the wounded during the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915, from a hastily dug 8-by-8-foot bunker in the back of the dyke along the Yser Canal about 2 miles north of Ypres.
13.
From June 1,1915, John McCrae was ordered away from the artillery to set up No 3 Canadian General Hospital at Dannes-Camiers near Boulogne-sur-Mer, northern France.
14.
On January 28,1918, while still commanding No 3 Canadian General Hospital at Boulogne, John McCrae died of pneumonia with "extensive pneumococcus meningitis" at the British General Hospital in Wimereux, France.
15.
John McCrae was buried the following day in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission section of Wimereux Cemetery, just a couple of kilometres up the coast from Boulogne, with full military honours.
16.
John McCrae's gravestone is placed flat, as are all the others in the section, because of the unstable sandy soil.
17.
John McCrae was designated a Person of National Historic Significance in 1946.
18.
John McCrae was erected by the Guelph Collegiate Vocational Institute.
19.
John McCrae is dressed as an artillery officer and his medical bag nearby, as he writes.