The collection documents the involvement of McGill faculty, students, alumni, and staff during the Second World War. It contains information on 5568 men and women on active service, including 295 women. It also provides information on the 298 dead, 52 prisoners of war, and 629 recipients of medals.

The greater portion consists of folders, index cards, newspaper clippings, correspondence, and photographs of individual soldiers and civilians. Index cards, documents and photographs were created and accumulated by Fetherstonhaugh and placed in alphabetical order within specific categories. The collection contains four distinct series: index cards; textual documents, including newspaper clippings; correspondence and articles arranged by subject; and photographs. The first series contains subseries reflecting Fetherstonhaugh’s original subdivision categories.

The index cards are arranged in the following groupings:

-Subversive activities
-Killed
-Prisoners of war
-University staff
-Macdonald College
-Army course
-COTC
-US
-General list A-H
-General list I-Mc
-General list M-Z
-Returned from active service
-Photos in extension file
-Photos on loan
-Women
-Civil

Other files in the collection include correspondence and newspaper clippings arranged by particular subjects; correspondence and newspaper clippings concerning the McGill War Memorial Campaign, 1947-1949; Fetherstonhaugh's account book of income and expenditures, and some vouchers, 1942-1946; McGill News articles, 1942-1946; correspondence, memoranda, invoices, reviews, and newspaper clippings, 1947-1948, concerning the book McGill University at War, 1914-1918; 1939-1945.

Fonds shows F.W. Harvey's medical activities and his interest in physical training. The fonds contains 2 day books, an obstetric record, a ledger and a scrapbook.

The fonds illustrates Dr. Elliott's work as a neurochemist and consists of correspondence, letters, articles, newspaper clippings, photographs, slides, research material and notes, course material, manuscripts, typescripts. The fonds is divided into seven series.

The fonds primarily reflects Pappius’s activities as a researcher at the Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital (MNI/H): both her experimental research as such and various support activities, including academic publication, coordination of research projects with colleagues, and acquiring funding. It also contains much information about her leadership of the Clinical Neurochemistry Laboratory. The fonds contains smaller amounts of documentation regarding her activities as a professor at McGill University, her administrative roles at the MNI/H, and her participation in professional organizations, which reflects the smaller place that those roles occupied in her professional life.

The period of time best documented in the fonds spans the early 1980s to Pappius’s retirement in 1995. Correspondence with colleagues, mostly though not exclusively work-related, contains relatively more material from Pappius’s early career; although, here too, most of the material dates from the 1980s and after.

The main document types in the fonds related to Pappius’s research activities are experiment worksheets and printed tabular research data. Many of the research-related files contain negatives of autoradiographies, with a smaller number of photographic prints. Correspondence can be found in many series besides series F (Correspondence), as much of Pappius’s work was collaborative in nature.

The fonds is divided into eight series: (A) Research, (B) Academic events, (C) Teaching, (D) Administrative activities, (E) Professional organizations, (F) Correspondence, (G) Personal collections, and (H) Visual documents.