John McCrae

John McCrae (1872–1918) was a Canadian physician, soldier and poet, born in Guelph, Ontario. He served as a gunner in the South African War and as a medical officer in the First World War, and taught medicine at McGill University.

He wrote “In Flanders Fields” at Ypres in May 1915 after the death of a friend. It was first published in Punch that December and became one of the best-known poems of the war. He died of pneumonia in France in January 1918, and In Flanders Fields and Other Poems appeared in 1919.