Sir Charles Tupper: Fighting Doctor to Father of Confederation

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

A Father of Confederation and our sixth prime minister, Charles Tupper
remains unfairly neglected in our history, and even in Nova Scotia,
where he was premier, lesser men are better remembered. Such is a
dominant theme of this short biography by a Dalhousie University
professor and his journalist wife.

This latest volume in the Canadian Medical Lives series pays special
attention to the medical career of Tupper, who left school at 15 to
apprentice in doctoring and at 19 left Nova Scotia to study at a
prestigious medical school in Edinburgh. He became chief medical officer
of Halifax, where he was instrumental in founding a medical school at
Dalhousie, and was president first of the Nova Scotia Medical
Association and then of the Canadian Medical Association; he remains the
only person ever to serve more than one term in the latter office. Even
during later years of political turbulence, Tupper “established a
medical practice ... wherever he was living, and the income from
medicine was equal to or greater than that of cabinet minister.”

The book’s 11 chapters are supplemented with photos, an 11-page
chronology, a select bibliography, and Tupper’s obituary by Sir
William Osler. Nothing new appears here; the authors cite only published
sources. Restraints of length in the text mean some abrupt paragraph
transitions, an assumption that many important contemporaries of Tupper
need no introduction, and much condensation. Some chapters are
subdivided into sections, one of which—“Life as a Cabinet
Minister”—consists of only three short paragraphs. Still, it has
been decades since we have had a significant biography of the man who,
according to Laurier, did most to bring about Confederation next to Sir
John A. Macdonald, and this will do until another major study appears.