1872-1918 · Canadian physician and soldier, author of the poem In Flanders Fields
About John McCrae
John McCrae (1872-1918), born in Guelph, Ontario, was a Canadian physician, pathologist and teacher of medicine at McGill University who had served as an artillery officer in the South African War. In 1914 he went overseas with the Canadian Expeditionary Force as brigade surgeon to the 1st Brigade, Canadian Field Artillery, and served through the Second Battle of Ypres. He later worked at a Canadian general hospital in France and died of pneumonia with meningitis at Wimereux in January 1918.
In Flanders Fields is a fifteen-line poem written in early May 1915 by John McCrae, a Canadian army doctor, during the Second Battle of Ypres in Belgium, the battle in which German forces first used chlorine gas on the Western Front. By the traditional account, McCrae wrote it the day after burying his friend and former student Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, killed by a shell on 2 May, in a small cemetery near his dressing station beside the Yser canal, where wild poppies were blooming among the graves.