Following on from his published dissertation, The Free Church in Victorian Canada, 1844–1861 (1989), completed in the University of Guelph's Scottish studies program, and Anglicans and the Atlantic World: High Churchmen, Evangelicals, and the Quebec Connection (2003), Richard W. Vaudry continues his focus on the history of evangelical Protestantism in Canada with Andrew Fernando Holmes: Protestantism, Medicine, and Science in Nineteenth-Century Montreal. A dearth of personal papers left by the prominent physician and surgeon Andrew Fernando Holmes (1797–1860) appears to make a full-scale biography impossible, so Vaudry aims instead for a “comprehensive study” (6) of the interlocking religious, medical, and scientific contexts that lent Holmes's life its meaning and his reputation its luster. As he proceeds, he changes gears halfway through, tackling his subject first chronologically and then thematically.

Overarching the three contextual themes addressed in the thematic chapters 5 to 7 (Holmes's practice of natural history; the politics of medicine at McGill University; and Holmes's practice of medicine), Vaudry deploys the concept of the Atlantic world, using, in turn, circum-, trans-, and cis-Atlantic analytical approaches (7) and the myriad Atlantics in which Holmes functioned. He notes, in addition, an Irish Atlantic with which Holmes's brother Benjamin, a leading Montreal politician and businessman, identified, but Andrew did not. As complicated and layered as all this sounds, Vaudry succeeds in leaving the reader with a nuanced understanding of the particular Atlantics—and the particular Montreals—with which Holmes did identify.

Vaudry outlines Holmes's travels from Cadiz in the Spanish Atlantic into which he was born a prisoner of war in 1797 to the emergent consumer Atlantic that characterized the British regime infiltrating Lower Canada (now the province of Québec) by the time Holmes's immigrant family settled in 1801, first in Québec and then in Montreal. There the reader encounters the rising aggressively anti-Catholic evangelical Atlantic that, Vaudry argues, formed a thoroughgoing “animating force” in Holmes's life (28). Evangelicals targeted Catholic Lower Canada as their “mission field” (36), and Vaudry shows the extent to which the game-changing consecration of their antithesis in 1840, the ultramontane Bishop Ignace Bourget (34), occurred as part of an intensifying competition for souls—and, indeed, identities—during a time when the colony's political situation was already deeply fraught.

Vaudry next brings to life the familiar Montreal names of the Aberdeen-Enlightened “educational entrepreneur” (37) Alexander Skakel and the physician Dr. Daniel Arnoldi, with their valuable contributions to Holmes's early schooling and medical apprenticeship, respectively. In moving on to Holmes's subsequent training in “medical Edinburgh,” however, Vaudry invokes “Dalton's atomic theories” and “Werner's views on natural history” (59) without offering the brief orientation that would help nonspecialists to make sense of these markers; the same goes for “Paley” later on (148). More importantly, Vaudry highlights the key additional contribution of the “French medical Atlantic” (7), the advanced clinical and experimental experience afforded in Paris hospitals, that rounded out Holmes's medical training before he returned home to practice in 1821.

The third—and last—chronological chapter lays out social, cultural, and institutional factors that underpinned Holmes's role in shaping the institutions that ultimately formed McGill University's Faculty of Medicine. Key here is Vaudry's triangulation of the usual Edinburgh-Montreal connection, adding Paris as the influence (through Holmes and his colleague John Stephenson) that clinched McGill medicine's reputation throughout North America by the 1830s (96). Yet these years also culminated in the outbreak of open rebellion in Lower Canada in 1837, closing the university for two years, during which Holmes continued to practice medicine and joined the volunteer British forces (101) that defended the regime in violent clashes especially in the towns around Montreal. We find out only later that, unlike his brother Benjamin, Holmes's membership in the Montreal Loyal Volunteers required no action on his part (139).

Vaudry reports Holmes's death in 1860 in the fourth of seven chapters, proceeding from there to spotlight themes that might more effectively have been integrated into the chronological sequence of Holmes's life and career. In “Family and Religious Life,” Vaudry describes the challenges faced along Montreal's cultural fault lines by the transatlantic evangelical mission (with Holmes supporting the Colonial Church and School Society) to supersede with a “French Protestant” identity—and but few successful inroads—the French-Canadian majority's identification of its Catholic faith with its language and culture (132). In “The Wonders of Creation,” Vaudry ventures back to the 1820s and 1830s to consider Holmes's practice of natural history, especially his role from 1827 as a founding member of the venerable Natural History Society of Montreal; yet its roots in Holmes's Edinburgh years seem lost in their distance in chapter 5 from the related material in chapter 2. Vaudry nevertheless does well to link Holmes's natural history explicitly to his evangelical faith; he also showcases Holmes's correspondence with one of the American geologists whom he preferred over William Logan as founding director of the Geological Survey of Canada in 1841. Vaudry gleans correctly—if only in the notes—that Holmes and Logan promoted “differing approaches to science” (304n146) at the time: in the scheme of John V. Pickstone's Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science, Technology and Medicine (2001), which Vaudry consulted (158), Holmes's approach remained “natural historical” while Logan had moved on to embrace the “analytical” (terms used in Ways of Knowing, 10–12). The last two chapters, on the politics and practice of medicine that preoccupied Holmes from the 1840s, reflect fallout from the rebellion years that is, once again, lost in its detachment from the chronology of his life.

Vaudry proposes strong conclusions: Holmes, “above all others, cast the original vision for medical education and clinical practice in Montreal”; through Holmes and J. W. Dawson in the next generation, “Protestant evangelicalism . . . laid the foundations of a scientific culture in the English-speaking community of Montreal” (255–56). Yet in situating Holmes at the “confluence” (255) of the Scottish Enlightenment and Protestant evangelicalism, he seems to put the cart, with its more diverse Protestant passengers, before the Enlightenment horse. If Holmes and his Montreal colleagues had not spent time in Edinburgh, Glasgow, or Aberdeen, their evangelicalism might have attained a different destination altogether.