The McGill Collection

Over the years, Canada Post has issued a veritable squadron of stamps with a McGill connection. These stamps of distinction have a long history. The earliest ones with McGill ties were issued in 1927, in a series celebrating the 60th anniversary of Confederation and those involved in its creation. Featured among them were law graduates Thomas D'Arcy McGee, BCL1861, and Sir Wilfrid Laurier, BCL1864, LLD1898. McGee, a vigorous proponent of both Canadian and Irish nationhood, also experienced the misfortune of being the highest-profile political assassination victim in Canadian history when he was gunned down in Ottawa in 1868. [Stamp7] Laurier was not

a father of confederation at all but slipped into the series anyway, getting his own stamp [8] then sharing another with Sir John A. Macdonald.

Macdonald's successor as prime minister, Sir John Abbott, BCL1854, DCL1867, was the third McGill graduate -- and the third Faculty of Law alumnus -- to warrant a stamp when he was featured in a series of prime ministers issued in 1952. [9] Abbott's tenure as PM was short-lived: he assumed the role in 1891, after Macdonald died in office, but quit 18 months later due to ill health. He had famously asserted, "I hate politics, I hate notoriety, public meetings, public speeches, caucuses, and everything that I know of that is apparently the necessary incident of politics." He felt that he was chosen as PM only because he was "not particularly obnoxious to anyone," a rare and laudable trait in a politician.

Medical Honours

A glance at Sourkes's collection suggests that the Faculty of Medicine dominates the Great McGill Stamp Competition, with ten graduates or faculty adorning the postal currency of Canada and other countries.

Sir William Osler, MDCM1872, LLD1895, is Medi-cine's most famous graduate -- and most famous faculty member, as well.[1] Remembered in medical histories as the founder of clinical medicine, Osler went on from McGill to teach at Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins before settling at Oxford. In 1969, his image was placed on a 6¢ stamp. Among others associated with the Faculty of Medicine is Norman Bethune, who held a clinical appointment at the Royal Victoria Hospital but resigned to participate in the Spanish Civil War, and traveled from there to China, where he established a medical service with the Communist Eighth Route Army during the Sino-Japanese War. In 1979, Canada Post commemorated him with two stamps bearing his image; across the globe, the Chinese postal system simultaneously issued another two Bethune stamps. [4,16]

In the early '90s, Canada Post also acknowledged the medical research of neurologist and neurosurgeon Dr. Wilder Penfield, founder of the Montreal Neurological Institute and a pioneer in the mapping of the brain.[2] The same series honoured anesthesiologist and teacher Harold Griffith, BA'14, MDCM'22, who greatly improved the safety and effectiveness of anesthetic techniques and established the first recovery room in Canada.[3]

Not all of the Faculty of Medicine graduates and faculty who ended up on stamps are recognized for accomplishments in medicine. John McCrae served as a pathologist at McGill beginning in 1900, but he also -- and more famously -- served in the Canadian Army in World War I, where he committed to paper the well-known war poem, "In Flanders Fields," published after his death from influenza in 1918. A 1968 stamp bears his image and the first two lines from the poem. [10] And the multi-talented Tait MacKenzie, MDCM1892, was an athlete and academic: the director of Physical Education at McGill and a teacher of anatomy. But he was also a gifted sculptor of figures in athletic poses, and photos of these works appeared on the 1976 stamps commemorating the Montreal Olympic Games.[5]

One of MacKenzie's colleagues in Physical Education was James Naismith, BA1887, who invented basketball in 1891 while teaching at Springfield College in Massachusetts. The U.S. recognized this accomplishment with a 1961 stamp on the 100th anniversary of Naismith's birth; [6] Canada Post issued its Naismith tribute on the centenary of basketball in 1991.

From the Nobels to the Notorious

Other McGill figures to be stuck in the upper right corner include humourist and economist Stephen Leacock in 1969, [11] and Nobel Prize-winning nuclear physics pioneer Ernest Rutherford in 1971 (who also appears on stamps from New Zealand, Sweden, Russia and Romania). [12]

In 1995, a stamp was issued honouring John Humphrey, BCom'25, BA'27, BCL'29, PhD'45, LLD'76, the McGill law professor who was responsible for writing the first draft of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights.[15] And in 1990, McGill paleontologist Hans Hofmann, PhD'62, saw one of his fossil specimens, a two-billion-year-old stromatolite (the fossil remains of ancient algae or bacteria) from northern Canada, appear on a commemorative stamp.

There are other McGill stamps from around the world that have made it into Sourkes's collection. The United States honoured Charles Drew, MDCM'33, an African-American doctor who pioneered research into blood preservation and organized blood banks. [13] The Swedish post office has commemorated the research of David Hubel, BSc'47, MDCM'51, who won a 1981 Nobel Prize for research into how the brain processes visual information, [17] and Frederick Soddy, a former Chemistry professor, a contemporary of Rutherford's, and another Nobel Prize winner. And the HARP (High Altitude Research Project) gun, a long-distance cannon developed by controversial aerophysicist and former Engineering professor Gerald Bull, was featured on a Barbados stamp issued in 1968 for World Meteorological Day. [14] This prototype "supercannon" started as a research project on the potential to launch payloads and satellites into space and was first tested in Barbados. Like McGee, Bull died as the victim of an assassin's bullet, presumably because of his (unsuccessful) work developing a supergun for Iraq.