Boston physician Benjamin Cotting graduated with honours from Harvard University in 1834 and received his degree from Harvard Medical School in 1937. In 1843 he became curator of the prestigious Lowell Institute where he encountered such famous scholars as Louis Agassiz, Sir Charles Lyell and others. He and his wife were among those who travelled to the Brazil with Agassiz his wife in 1865. He also made several recreational trips to Europe: in 1848, 1860, and 1865. Several speeches that he delivered before the Massachusetts Medical Society were published; in 1874 he became the society’s president. He was a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Born into a distinguished military family as the daughter of Brigadier General William Henry Cotton, Dorothy P. Cotton, became one of the famed nursing Bluebirds/Oiseaux bleus (so-called because of their blue uniforms) during World War I. After graduating from Montreal’s Royal Victoria Hospital in 1910, she was one of the 3,000 Canadian nurses to join the Canadian Army Medical Corps. In her case, this was in Battalion no. 3, a special six-month project of McGill University in England and France (1915-1916). She then was sent to Russia as part of a group of 37 nurses sent to a ward of Petrograd Hospital, then under Anglo-Russian direction. Recalled to England, she returned to Petrograd in 1917 and witnessed the Russian Revolution. When she returned again to England, she was assigned the position of matron at an officers' hospital until 1918, when she was transferred to the Camp Hill Military Hospital in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She was demobilized in 1919, having received the British War Medal and the Victory Medal. The next year, on behalf of the Canadian Nursing Mission, she led a team of eight to Romania to establish a training school for nurses at Cotzea Hospital in Bucharest. Later she worked briefly at the Rockefeller Institute in Paris (1921-1922) and later in Saskatchewan as a public-health nurse with the Victorian Order of Nurses. Throughout the war years she had kept detailed diaries and written copious letters home, many of which are in the Robert C. Fetherstonhaugh Collection of World War I Letters and Diaries in the McGill University Archives.

T. F. Cotton was born in Cowansville, Quebec and received his B.A. in 1905 and his M.D., C.M. in 1909 from McGill University. A cardiologist, he practiced in England. He was devoted to Sir William Osler and secured a place for the Osler Club of London in the new Royal College of Physicians. In his will, Cotton endowed the Thomas F. Cotton Professorship in the History of Medicine at McGill.