A Battlefield Doctor & Poet

Canadian Dr. John McCrae (1872–1918) is remembered less for the fact that he was a doctor than for the fact that he wrote the famous World War I poem "In Flanders Fields."

In spring 1915, McCrae was working as a brigade surgeon during the Second Battle of Ypres. He wrote this poem after performing a burial service (sometimes required of the surgeons when there was no chaplain available) for his friend, on May 3, 1915: