John McCrae was born in 1872 in Guelph and studied medicine at the University of Toronto. He interned with Sir William Osler at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and returned to Canada to undertake a fellowship at McGill University.
After fighting in the South African War, he returned to Montreal to work as a resident pathologist at the Montreal General Hospital and other Montreal Hospitals. By 1909, he was lecturing in medicine at McGill.
He volunteered for service in World War I, and was a brigade surgeon for the Canadian Forces Artillery. He was at Ypres in Belgium during the notorious cholorine gas attack. In that battle, he lost a close friend from home, and since there was no chaplain available, handled the burial ceremony himself.
It was between treating the wounded on the field, after the death of his friend, that McCrae scrawled the short immortal poem that so many have learned and recited since. "In Flanders Fields" is an apostrophe of the dead soldiers who address the living, passing the torch forward and asking their comrades not to break faith but to carry on. It gained wide recognition in Canada, Britain and elsewhere.
"In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place..."
Dr. John McCrae treated the wounded at the worst battles of World War I: not only Ypres, but the Somme, Passchendaele, Arras and Vimy Ridge. The unremitting work, lack of sleep and emotional drain of seeing so many wounded, dead and dying took a terrible toll on his health. An asthmatic since his youth, he died in a French field hospital of pneumonia complications and was buried in Wimereux near Boulougne. He was 46 years old.
A century later, his poem lives on in the memories of Canadians, a special element of the solemn Remembrance Day ceremony. The choice of the poppy as a symbol to remember the war dead is also associated with McCrae's poem.
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