What the Doctor Ordered

Dr. J. Lester McCallum, BA’37, MDCM’43, is the very personification of loyalty. The good doctor has stayed in touch with McGill since he graduated 65 years ago, including giving generously to the Alma Mater Fund for well over 40 years. Dr. McCallum, who became a Professor of Medicine while a staff physician at the Montreal General Hospital, is modest about his long streak of giving. “McGill provides me with a good pension, so I feel I should give something back,” he says.

Probe a little deeper, and more details emerge. In anticipation of his 65th reunion this fall, he has taken on contacting his classmates and compiling a highly successful newsletter –and doing an “incredible job at it,” says his son, David McCallum. To keep on top of the job, Dr. McCallum has acquired a computer and learned how to use the Internet.

Dr. McCallum’s annual gifts are directed mainly to the Faculty of Medicine, including a bursary fund for students in financial need, which was established by his graduating class for their 50th anniversary. The fund helps support the studies of five or six deserving medical students every year. “It’s gratifying to know students are benefiting from that,” he says.

As a young boy on the family farm during the Great Depression, McCallum aspired to become a doctor. But when he graduated with a BA in 1937, he became a schoolteacher instead. “Bursaries weren’t available when I was a student,” he explains. “I had to leave university since I had no money to pay the fees, and our family never borrowed.”

He became a medical student in 1940, helped along by the federal government, which permitted him tojoin the army, giving him a private’s pay and the privilege of wearing a military uniform. Because of the war, the medical course was shortened from four years to three. Despite the concentrated time frame for his medical studies, he found time to join the McGill Men’s Glee Club and sang in the Stanley Presbyterian Church Choir, where he met his wife Doris, BMus’34, already an established pianist and accompanist.

Nowadays, Dr. McCallum remains equally interested in the quality of teaching and of research in the Faculty of Medicine. “I think McGill’s advancements are marvelous,” he says, “and I am particularly impressed with the quality of staff appointments, who keep the University in the forefront of advances in medicine.”