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In today’s parlance, the poem went viral.

Photo by Dave Sidaway / Montreal Gazette

And more than a century later, its power and effect endure. In Flanders Fields is a fixture in Remembrance Day observances, including those to take place Monday, Nov. 11, at the McGill University Health Centre’s Glen and Montreal General Hospital sites.

The Glen site has a permanent tribute to McCrae, who had a close connection to Montreal and to McGill, where he did some of his postgraduate medical training and worked as a doctor and teacher.

McGill’s Osler Library of the History of Medicine is also home to two original versions of In Flanders Fields: One is written in McCrae’s own hand and included with a letter he sent in May 1916 to a friend in Cambridge, Mass. The other is part of an Oct. 30 entry in the 1915 diary of Clare Gass, a Montreal General Hospital nursing graduate who served with McCrae in No. 3 Canadian General Hospital in France, made up of McGill doctors and nurses. McCrae arrived there in June 1915 from Belgium.Presumably, he shared the poem with her and she entered it into her diary — nearly six weeks before its initial publication in Punch on Dec. 8.