Known to his friends and colleagues as a fine physician and an outstanding soldier, John McCrae won international fame for the authorship of one poem, "In Flanders Fields,"which was composed during the second battle of Ypres and published anonymously in Punch on 8 December 1915. It quickly became popular among the British troops and during World War I became "the poem of the army." Today, in much of the English-speaking world, the poem is memorized by schoolchildren and is an essential feature of Remembrance Day ceremonies.

John McCrae, the son of David and Janet Simpson McCrae, was born in Guelph, Ontario, where his Scots Presbyterian family had been established for several generations. He attended local schools, then won a scholarship to the University of Toronto, graduating with a degree in biology in 1894. After an unsuccessful year of teaching at the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph, McCrae returned to the...