John McCrae on death

Here too, [John Alexander McCrae] has capitalized and personified Death, but the piece differs from In Flanders Fields in that it is squared against sacrifice. Underlying it is the question: "Is this expenditure worth it?" A simple restatement of the verse McCrae quotes might be "Generals die in bed." The dead of Flanders emphatically care about the purpose and meaning of the battles they fought; the dead in this earlier piece are "done with kingdoms and republics." Despite these misgivings, which are rather atypical in the McCrae oeuvre, the attitude of profound respect toward death is of a piece with the famous poem. As [John Prescott] states, "There remained with him always an awareness of life's transience and a fervent commitment to duty."1 Even the most cursory glance at McCrae's oeuvre cannot escape its morbidity, its concern with death. In the definitive pamphlet of McCrae's poetry published by his medical colleague and man of letters Sir Andrew Macphail, there are 29 poems.2 Perhaps five of them do not mention death; all the others mention, at the least, shadow and darkness. Prescott, wrote that "Many of the poems written in McCrae's early manhood, and some written after 1900, have a preoccupation with death. The achievement of peace after death was a constant theme in his poetry."1 It is not widely known that McCrae helped MacPhail with The Book of Sorrow, a collection of poems about bereavement and sorrow. It was over 500 pages long. Why this morbidity? In medical school, choosing the career of pathology, as McCrae did, is tantamount to an admission that one wishes to practise medicine divorced from patient contact. The cliché is that the nascent pathologist is not well-disposed or skillful with people. But this was not the case with McCrae. Both his biographers take great pains to emphasize McCrae's genuine affability, describing him as hale and the possessor of an inexhaustible trove - not a one repeated - of anecdotes. He kept the company of people such as the humourist Stephen Leacock, was a darling of Sir William Osler and beloved by the students he instructed at McGill University in Montréal, Quebec. And pathology at that time was not as pejorative as it is perceived by students now; McCrae took it up "with the wholehearted support of Osler, who believed that a good grounding in pathology was vital to success in medicine."4 Nevertheless, the fit between McCrae and pathology in the modern sense is undeniable. Prescott quotes the following i