Andrew F. Holmes (1797–1860) of Montreal was a prominent physician, surgeon, natural historian, educational administrator, and evangelical Anglican. His name is synonymous with the McGill University medical faculty. The author of this biography argues that “Holmes's evangelicalism was both deeply personal and an animating force in his public life” (28).

Vaudry has left no stone unturned. In addition to the book's 258 pages of text, there are another seventy of notes, along with a fifty-three page bibliography. Among the strengths of this study is its exceptionally granular, multi-faceted depiction of life in Montreal, the chief city of British North America at the time, and the energetic hub of a colonial maturation and expansion that would birth, less than a decade after Holmes's death, the Dominion of Canada.

While Montreal was just 300 miles north of Boston, it was in some ways a world apart. It was a bilingual city, situated at the jostling interface of Anglophone and Francophone societies, in a province still governed by the British crown. Through North Atlantic maritime travel and trade, it remained integrally connected to, and dependent upon, Great Britain as well as France and the rest of Europe.

Like a masterful docent, the author guides readers through the museum of Holmes's time and place, pausing often to peer closely at portraits and displays mounted therein. Indeed, the book's current title and subtitle might easily have been flipped. Moreover, it is impossible to assign this biography to a single field of conventional historical inquiry. Like its subject, it is situated at the intersection of Canadian, medical, scientific, and religious history, and it shines light into each of these spheres of study.

The first three of the volume's seven chapters present in a broadly chronological order Holmes's formative years and early career achievements. Beginning with his birth in Cadiz, Spain, they describe his private school education in Montreal in the tradition of the Scottish Common Sense Philosophy, his apprenticeship to one of the few physicians practicing locally, his subsequent medical training at the University of Edinburgh (graduating in 1819) and Paris, and his return to Montreal that same year. In 1822, he and four other physicians founded the first medical school in British North America, which was soon reorganized as the medical faculty of McGill University. Holmes was its effective leader during its first four decades.

The remaining four chapters treat in order the religious aspects of Holmes's life, his scientific activities, and his contributions to medicine. Chapter 4 describes his active involvement in numerous voluntary societies designed to promote elementary education and literacy as well as Protestant proselytizing of Roman Catholic French Canadians. The latter included the trans-denominational French Canadian Missionary Society and a complementary Anglican endeavor. Both were motivated by a conviction that conversion to evangelical Protestant Christianity would produce eternal benefits for the converts and considerable temporal advantages for the United Province of the Canadas as a whole. Following the turbulence of the Lower Canadian rebellions of the 1830s, Lord Durham's landmark report had recommended that French Canadians should be gradually assimilated into the “superior” British culture. Arguably as an alternative to such de facto cultural genocide, Holmes and other like-minded evangelical Protestants believed instead that “the identification of French Canadian nationality with Roman Catholicism must be broken” (135).

Chapter 5 explores Holmes's two amateur scientific pursuits of botany and minerology. He had studied botany while in Edinburgh and began to collect flora specimens from the Montreal area from 1820 onward. He became part of an exchange and discovery network with collectors in the United States and Great Britain. He was the principal figure in the establishment of the Natural History Society of Montreal (NHSM) in 1827. Holmes followed a similar pattern of inquiry and collection in minerology. The NHSM was also instrumental in helping to launch in 1842 the Geological Survey of Canada to identify the geological resources, soils, water, and mineralogical particulars of the province.

Vaudry reminds readers that these botanical and mineralogical networks were populated predominantly by evangelical scientists, who collectively viewed their inquiries as religiously legitimate and apologetically edifying, inasmuch as, according to William Paley's influential Natural Theology (1848), the natural world displayed the handiwork of its Creator, showing him to be powerful, wise and benevolent. The author is able to demonstrate clearly that Holmes aligned personally with this evidentialist perspective (163–169).

Chapters 6 and 7 are devoted to Holmes's contributions to the politics and practice of medicine in British North America. On the political side, Holmes's defended McGill's advantageous position against competitive and upstart medical schools more representative of the Irish Catholic and French Catholic constituencies. He also worked to maintain the medical faculty's relative independence from both regulatory bodies and licensing boards as well as the administrative oversight of the larger university.

Holmes was a practicing physician and surgeon in a transitional era in which bloodletting was the panacea of choice and stethoscopes and microscopes were still novelties. His reputation as a medical researcher was established in 1824 by his discovery of an abnormally formed heart (later known as the Holmes heart). He was also active in mitigating a serious cholera pandemic in 1832 and in initiating more effective and humane procedures for difficult childbirth and obstetric cases. Holmes died in 1860 of, ironically, a heart attack. The cause of death was determined by an immediate autopsy, customary at the time, conducted by, and in full view of, his grieving colleagues.

Vaudry depicts Holmes at the confluence of the Scottish Enlightenment and nineteenth-century Protestant evangelicalism. His scientific and medical pursuits were grounded in the conviction that science displays the handiwork of God, and reason, empirical science, and social progress serve to advance the Kingdom of God. There were few hints of science-faith conflict in Holmes's “antebellum” worldview, just prior to Darwin and the ensuing Victorian crisis of faith.

In the end, however, and through no fault of the author, Holmes himself remains a somewhat hidden, less than fully rounded, figure. His carefully chronicled achievements must be allowed to speak for the private man. Perhaps this is fitting, given Holmes's own commendation of those who work away “in secret, looking for [their] main reward in the approval of [their] own conscience” (125).