William Henry Drummond: Poet in Patois

Mark W. Cortiula is an assistant professor of history at Nipissing
University in North Bay.

This latest volume in a series of medical biographies designed to
highlight the lives of noted Canadian physicians is prodigiously
researched.

William Henry Drummond was an Irish-Canadian doctor who was noted for
his poetry, particularly the poems he wrote about 19th-century rural
French-Canadian life. His writing utilized a type of patois, “a
combination of massacred English and very bad French,” initially
developed by the French settlers in order to communicate with the
English. While his poems (of which there are numerous examples in the
text) may be viewed as condescending toward the French, particularly in
these politically correct times, Lyons argues that Drummond’s poetry,
far from being patronizing, reflected his admiration for rural French
Canadians, particularly the habitant farmers, voyageurs, and village
women who become his central characters.

Although the book is useful for its chronological overview of
Drummond’s life, listing events and honors that came Drummond’s way,
it lacks an analytical focus and critical approach. There is little
insight into what motivated Drummond to abandon his lucrative medical
practice for a literary career. Moreover, the doctor’s approach to
19th-century medicine is also given short shrift. Apart from selected
anecdotes on a few of his patients, the treatment of his medical life is
perfunctory at best. Therefore, those interested in Drummond’s largely
forgotten literary contributions will find much here; those interested
in a rigorous historical treatment of a late 19th-century medical life
will be disappointed.