Andrew Fernando Holmes: Protestantism, Medicine, and Science in Nineteenth-Century Montreal by Richard W. Vaudry

Reviewed by: Andrew Fernando Holmes: Protestantism, Medicine, and Science in Nineteenth-Century Montreal by Richard W. Vaudry David Wright Richard W. Vaudry. Andrew Fernando Holmes: Protestantism, Medicine, and Science in Nineteenth-Century Montreal. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020. viii + 390 pp. Ill. $60.00 (978-4875-0219-5). Andrew Holmes may not be a household name to many medical historians, but he was the principal founder of Canada’s first medical school. The Montreal Medical Institution, later McGill University’s Faculty of Medicine, would become one of the most influential medical schools in the English-speaking world, boasting such notable faculty members as William Osler and Wilder Penfield. In this exhaustively researched biography, Vaudry charts the life and times of Holmes, from medical apprenticeship in colonial Montreal, to formal university-based training in Edinburgh, clinical internship in Paris, and finally returning to be one of McGill’s first deans of medicine. So central was Holmes to the foundation of medical studies at the so-called Harvard of the North, that the gold medal for academic achievement in medicine at McGill is named after this evangelical physician. Vaudry anchors the career of Holmes in the turbulent economic and political times of Montreal during the first half of the nineteenth century. It was during this era that this small town, founded during New France and lying at the confluence of the St. Lawrence and Ottawa rivers, began to emerge as the principal commercial center of Lower Canada. After the British conquest, it boasted a small, but powerful, Anglo-Scottish commercial elite, a large working-class French-Canadian Catholic majority, and, by the 1840s, an impoverished Irish population fleeing the Famine. Sectarianism would be the dominant divider in the rapidly growing city, leading to separate schooling, separate religious communities, and, most relevant to this book, separate hospital systems. The creation of the Montreal Medical Institution and its affiliated Montreal General Hospital in the 1820s were thus not simply an attempt to modernize medical education and clinical practice in an unusual corner of the British Empire; it was also a noteworthy symbol of Anglo-Protestant dominance in pre-Confederation Canada. Medicine at McGill has long been associated with the Scottish tradition of medical education, which, in the early 1800s, had become the gold standard in clinical techniques and novel pedagogies. The medical schools of Edinburgh and Glasgow, in particular, were destinations for students travelling from the four corners of Empire. In Edinburgh, Holmes sought qualifications as a surgeon while pursing the increasingly desirable university designation of M.D. Vaudry paints a rich portrait of the culture of medical education in Edinburgh in the 1810s, where institutional nepotism and competition from extramural lecturers engendered a fluid medical environment, and where lively urban societies provided valuable opportunities for networking and socialization. He highlights how Holmes, and many of his fellow Canadian students, drew additional experience from their sojourns in Paris, where they found inspiration in French clinicians’ attempts to reconcile the often feuding surgical and medical branches of the profession. Indeed, the unusual McGill dual designation of MDCM (doctor of medicine and master of surgery) symbolized this hope for a unified future. [End Page 271] As the rather lengthy title suggests, Vaudry illuminates the multifaceted aspect of Holmes’ life, not only as a doctor but also as a Protestant evangelist and amateur natural scientist. Holmes clearly had diverse intellectual preoccupations, devoting as much time to his mineralogical collections and advancing evangelical causes as he did promoting the new medical school at McGill. For historians of medicine, a chapter on Holmes’s life as a medical lecturer, in the generation just before the advent of “scientific medicine,” serves as an excellent case study of the pluralism of medical practice at mid-century. Holmes combined older “heroic” techniques—from bloodletting to blistering—with new instruments and techniques of mid-century, including the stethoscope and chloroform. Occasional published research—such as his various papers on cardiac abnormalities—led to the eponymous appellation of the Holmes heart. In summary, this book offers a useful addition to our understanding of the early years of Canadian medicine and medical schools, one which avoids the too-often triumphalist approaches that lionize great...

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