This is the first comprehensive study of the life and work of Andrew Fernando Holmes, famous for his work on congenital heart disease.

Physician, surgeon, natural historian, educator, Protestant evangelical. Andrew Fernando Holmes’s name is synonymous with the McGill medical faculty and with the discovery of a congenital heart malformation known as the "Holmes heart." Born in captivity at Cadiz, Spain, Holmes immigrated to Lower Canada in the first decade of the nineteenth century. He arrived in a province that was experiencing profound social, economic, and cultural change as the result of a long process of integration into the British Atlantic world. A transatlantic perspective, therefore, undergirds this biography, from an exploration of how Holmes’s family members were participants in an Atlantic world of trade and consumption, to explaining how his educational experiences at Edinburgh and Paris informed his approach to the practice of medicine, medical education, and medical politics.

Richard W. Vaudry is an emeritus professor in the Department of History at The King’s University.

Richard Vaudry's profile page

"Vaudry’s mastery of the historiography of medicine, science, and religion of the late-18th and mid-19th centuries results in a lucid, all-embracing, and satisfying assessment of Holmes’s life and varied lasting contributions."

<em>American Review of Canadian Studies</em>

“This book offers a useful addition to our understanding of the early years of Canadian medicine and medical schools, one which avoids the too-often triumphalist approaches that lionize great men and treat the success of McGill (and other subsequent institutions) as somehow inevitable.”

<em>Bulletin of the History of Medicine</em>

"As the best history books do, this one carries bracing reminders on every page of just how much the world has changed."

<em>McGill Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences Alumni & Friends</em>