John McCrae

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Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae around 1914

John McCrae (* the 30th November 1872 in Guelph , Canada ; † 28. January 1918 in Boulogne-sur-Mer , France ) was a Canadian poet , writer and physician who during the First World War as a medical officer in the medical corps of the Canadian Forces served . McCrae became known in the English-speaking world through his war poem In Flanders Fields , which he wrote out of grief over a fallen comrade.

Life

The house where he was born in Guelph, now McCrae House

John McCrae was descended from Scottish immigrants. He was the second son of Lieutenant David McCrae and Janet Simpson Eckford. He had inherited his enthusiasm for military affairs from his father. At age 14 he became a cadet in the Hatfield Cadet Corps . He was an excellent student who received a scholarship to the University of Toronto when he was 16 . There he graduated in 1894 with a Bachelor of Arts , but then turned to medicine and graduated in 1898 as a Doctor of Medicine ( MD ). McCrae wrote and published his first poems at university. During his studies McCrae had already joined the militia regiment The Queen's Own Rifles of Canada , in which he rose to captain and served as company commander. At the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston , he was trained as an artilleryman . At Garrett Hospital , a children's hospital in Maryland , he did a medical training . 1902 followed a further training as a pathologist at the Montréal General Hospital . In 1904 he became an assistant doctor in pathology at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal . In the same year he went to England to study and became a member of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh .

John McCrae about 1912

Although he continued to work at various clinics, he opened his own practice in Montreal in 1905. In 1908 he became a doctor for infectious diseases at the Royal Alexandra Hospital there . In 1910 he joined a canoe expedition of the Governor General of Canada , Lord Gray , through Hudson Bay . During the Second Boer War , McCrae served as an artilleryman. On his return he was appointed professor of pathology at the University of Vermont , where he taught until 1911 (at the same time he also lectured at McGill University in Montreal).

John McCrae's grave in Wimereux, Northern France

When Great Britain declared war on the German Reich , Canada, as the Dominion of the Empire, also took part in the war. McCrae was appointed medical doctor with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and was used in the Second Battle of Flanders near Ypres . The death of his comrade and former student Lieutenant Alexis Helmer inspired him on May 3, 1915 to write the poem In Flanders Fields , which appeared in the British magazine Punch that same year and quickly became one of the most popular poems about the war.

On June 1, 1915, McCrae was named No. 3 Canadian General Hospital posted to Dannes- Camiers in northern France , near Boulogne-sur-Mer . However, the field hospital, which consisted only of tents, did not withstand the rough weather for long, and so the hospital was relocated to an old Jesuit school in Boulogne. During this time McCrae's health deteriorated, who had suffered from asthma for his entire life and was weakened by the war. He died on January 28, 1918 of complications from pneumonia in combination with meningitis . McCrae was buried with full honors in the cemetery of Wimereux , near Boulogne.

A short time after his death, a collection of his poems appeared under the title In Flanders Fields and Other Poems .

Posthumous honors

The poem at McCrae House, Guelph, recorded on Remembrance Day , 2009

In Canada, numerous public institutions, primarily schools, are named in honor of John McCrae, including the John McCrae Public School in his native Guelph. His birthplace there, the McCrae House , houses a museum. The Canadian War Museum in Ottawa also has special exhibitions in the Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae Gallery .

In the Cloth Hall of Ypres , the In Flanders Fields Museum, named after McCrae's poem, commemorates the events of the First World War. Ypres itself is a street on the channel on which McCrae's dressing station was named after him. A short biography with a photo is in his memory in the Saint Martin's Cathedral in Ypres.

In 2015 McCrae was inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame .

literature

  • John McCrae: In Flanders Fields and other Poems . William Briggs 1919; Reprinted by Dodo Press, 2005, ISBN 1-905432-28-3
  • Linda Granfield (Author), Janet Wilson (Illustrations): In Flanders Fields - The Story of the Poem by John McCrae . Doubleday, 1996, ISBN 0-385-32228-3

Web links

Commons : John McCrae  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ John Peddie: The Story of John McCrae ( Memento November 28, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ John McCrae. In: Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online. Retrieved July 30, 2010 .
  3. ↑ The Canadian Medical Hall of Fame: Dr. John McCrae. Retrieved November 11, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME McCrae, John
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Canadian poet, writer, and medicinarian
DATE OF BIRTH November 30, 1872
PLACE OF BIRTH Guelph , Ontario , Canada
DATE OF DEATH January 28, 1918
Place of death Boulogne-sur-Mer , France