Item 8 - Nurses’ letters and diaries

McGill graduate Harold Featherstonhaugh became an architect renowned for such Montreal landmarks as the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul and the Birks building which now houses the McGill Faculty of Religious Studies. He was a lieutenant in the Artillery Field Regiment before World War I; he then served in the 39th Battery during the war and was awarded the Military Cross in 1917. Earlier, he had worked with Edward and William Sutherland Maxwell, then in 1923 after the war, he became a partner in an architectural firm with J.C. McDougall; in 1934 he began working on his own until 1955.

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.

Dr. Harry Pavey, the prominent Montreal clinical surgeon, passed his McGill University medical examination in 1903. He went on to study medical specializations in Edinburgh, completing his post graduate exam there in 1904, which entitled him to write MD, CM, LRCP after his name and earned him a post at Montreal’s Royal Victoria Hospital. In 1915 he enlisted at Canadian Forces Base and served with the Canadian Army Medical Corps, attached to the 60th Battalion.

Physician and surgeon Arthur Fisher was born in Woodstock, New Brunswick, where he attended the Carleton County Grammar School, graduating in 1905. He then received a medical degree and after the outbreak of World War I was appointed to the Royal Army Medical Corps as a lieutenant in 1915, becoming attached to the 58th Field Company Royal Engineers based in Calais, France. He also served with the 56th Field Ambulance and was temporary captain in France when he was killed by a shell while trying to find a suitable place for an advanced dressing station. He was posthumously awarded the Order of St. Sava, 5th class, conferred by the King of Serbia. His name appears of the Carleton County war memorial.