(1 Jan. 1806-14 March 1866), physician. (date of birth 1801 also found; also age at death both 60 and 61) (Dr Grant) Born in Inverness-shire, Scotland. His father James Grant of Corrimony (1743-1835), a well-connected Scottish advocate of Jacobite family background and of liberal political opinions, was important enough to have his biography, even if it was a short one, appear in the Dictionary of National Biography and its successor the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. A minor but significant figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, he was the author of several books valued in their day. Among his friends this James Grant numbered Francis Jeffrey, the great editor of the liberal and reforming Edinburgh Review.

     The younger James Grant, the subject of the present article, received the medical qualification of L.R.C.S. in Edinburgh. This qualification was roughly approximate to that of M. D. Though Grant never seems to have obtained an M. D. degree, he was commonly known as Dr Grant, presumably in accordance with the contemporary practice of so naming any medical man. After a short period of residence in Montreal following his emigration from Britain, Dr Grant settled about 1832 at Martintown as a physician. There he practised medicine with great success over many years. Well regarded as a man and a physician, he shared the experience of so many of his medical contemporaries in Upper Canada of receiving little financial return from his practice.

     Dr Grant frequently ran as a candidate for the provincial parliament. He was described, with some exaggeration of the period of time involved, by a correspondent (“Loyalty,” at St. Raphael’s) in the Montreal Gazette of 3 July 1849 as having been a candidate “at almost every election in the county [GC] for the last quarter of a century.” With regard to his role in the 1836 election in GC, he was described as “the excommunicated O’Grady’s tool, Grant.” (Cornwall Observer 11 July 1836) In Nov. 1839 he was the sponsor, with James Lane of Alexandria and Kenneth M’Laughlin of Lancaster, of a Durham meeting to be held at Alexandria. (Cornwall Observer 7 Nov. 1839) Later that month, there were critical references to Dr Grant, who was “promoting a ‘Durham address’.” (Cornwall Observer 21 Nov. 1839)

     Of all his campaigns, perhaps the best remembered is that of GC 1841 for the first House of Assembly of the Province of Canada. Running as a Reformer, he was defeated in the election of March 1841 by the young John Sandfield Macdonald, who was just beginning his distinguished political career. In an election manifesto dated at Glengarry, 19 Feb. 1841, Grant denounced “the plundering Family Compact,” and called for a fairer distribution of the Clergy Reserves. With sharp remarks about lawyers, he pledged that if elected he would introduce a bill to establish county courts to reduce legal expenses. “Our future prosperity,” he stated, “depends on three great circumstances, viz: a continuance of British Connection, Lord Sydenham [the Governor General] , as administrator of our wants and wishes, for he who stood so long in the reform ranks of the [British] House of Commons, can give us all the reform we want [;] & firm & honest representatives at his back to maintain the rights of the people.” In 1844 he ran again, once more unsuccessfully, against Macdonald in GC. When he was a candidate for GC in 1844, the Cornwall Observer 16 Oct. 1844 said that “The Dr. is an independent Reformer and a man of acknowledged talent.”

     In 1849 Dr Grant seems to have received a political appointment to a “lucrative office” at Hull, perhaps as a result of some alliance with Macdonald. (Montreal Gazette 3 July 1849) If Dr Grant left Martintown to live in Hull at this time, he was soon back in his old life as a Martintown man, and his familiar, well-filled Upper Canada career went on. He was a political candidate in Stormont County in 1854 and possibly also in 1851. (Cornwall Constitutional, 6 July 1854, 13 Nov. 1851) In 1857, during a visit to the western districts of the province, he was warmly entertained at a public supper by Highlanders in Hamilton, many of them wearing Highland costume, and a Highland Volunteer Company paraded in full uniform to honour him. (Cornwall Constitutional 16 July 1857) However, amid social life, he could not forget politics. Early in 1858 the Toronto Globe noted with regard to the current GC election, that “We see that our cranky old friend, Dr. Grant, has been making his quadrennial exhibition of himself at the Glengarry nomination. Poor Doctor!” Grant was himself evidently not a candidate in the election. However, a Globe writer noted on the election outcome, “The Tories and their recent convert, the renegade Reformer, Dr. Grant, have received such a drubbing,…” (Globe 8, 13, & 18 Jan. 1858)

     In 1864, Dr Grant moved from Martintown to Ottawa. It appears that he wished to escape the exhaustingly extensive county practice, and have instead a more manageable town practice. However, he died in Ottawa two years later. Among his activities in Ottawa, he had been physician to the County of Carleton Protestant Hospital. He is buried today in Ottawa’s Beechwood cemetery. His body was removed to this cemetery in 1877, from a previous burial place which was probably the St. James Anglican cemetery in Hull. Dr Grant was a Mason, belonging to the Cornwall Lodge. One of his brothers, who predeceased him, is said to have been chief justice in Calcutta.

     Dr Grant was married to Jane Ord. They were the parents of Sir James Alexander Grant.

     Dr Grant remains one of the legendary figures of 19th-century GC history. Rhodes Grant preserves a few recollections of Dr Grant, which we may regard as conformable to the spirit of the man, even though Rhodes Grant disturbingly gets his Christian name wrong. Rhodes Grant reports that this pioneer physician was “long remembered for his skill and kindness.” And Rhodes Grant tells the story of how Dr Grant, who was “No puritan,” got his glasses broken in a drunken fight with a boon companion called Duncan McMartin. Rhodes Grant also attempts an explanation of why Grant came to Martintown, and identifies the location of his Martintown home. Dr Grant was one of the guests at the banquet at Fraserfield so memorably described by John Fraser’s Canadian Pen and Ink Sketches (p. 117). At one of 19th-century GC’s most memorable celebrations, the great ball and supper held in Alexandria in 1857 on the occasion of the completion of Donald A. (Sandfield) Macdonald’s steam mill, Dr Grant presided at the supper, and from the newspaper report of his remarks we get a valued glimpse of him as a human being–articulate, amiable, convivial, warm natured, easy in company. By his origins and his profession, Dr Grant belonged to the GC social elite of his day, which included the Nor’Westers. (John Rae, who was in many ways a parallel figure, left just before Grant’s arrival.)

     An anecdote reports that John Dougall of the Montreal Witness, a temperance speaker, urged the public to buy out the liquor on sale at Martintown in the store of Dr Grant, “a politician and a fluent speaker.” The idea was that when the storekeeper had been financially satisfied in this way, the liquor outlet could be permanantly closed. Grant, who had been impressed but not convinced by the speaker, declined to support the project. (Witness 4 Sept. 1894, reporting this event years later ) Running a side business, such as a store, would not have been out of order for a poorly paid physician of the era. (See, e. g., Dr D. E. McIntyre for another merchant physician) At some time during the pastorate (begun 1853) of the Rev. Daniel Gordon at St. Elmo, Dr Grant was the physician who attended to the illness of one of the Gordon children, Gilbert, afterwards himself a physician. James Begg, who also lived far away, in Roxborough Township (16 miles from Martintown, as he calculated), remembered that when he was taken seriously ill at time which seems to have been in the 1850s, “Dr. Grant (father of James Grant of Ottawa) bled me until I fainted.”

     Dr Grant of the present article had as his contemporary in Eastern Ontario Dr John Grant, of Dundas County, who was present at the Battle of the Windmill and was at one time coroner of SDG. (Canniff, 400-401). Harkness has noticed a Dr James A. Grant, who was practising at Williamstown in 1853, and who may be different from both Dr Grant and his distinguished son.

Surprisingly, he has no Dictionary of Canadian Biography life * obituary Bytown Gazette 15 March 1866 (an important source) * Canniff 398 * Rhodes Grant, i, 86 * Harkness, 447, 451 * Hodgins: index * Collins [as in notes for Sir James Grant], with portraits of Dr Grant and his wife and a drawing of their (assumed) first home at Martintown *information about his death, burial, kindly supplied by Ottawa Branch, Ontario Genealogical Society * election manifesto of 1841: printed (with a note of disapproval by the editor) Cornwall Observer 25 Feb. 1841 * candidates and progress of election in GC, Montreal Gazette, 18 March 1841 * polling results in 1841 GC election, Cornwall Observer 18 March 1841 *1857 ball and supper: Montreal Evening Pilot, 17 Jan. 1857, repr. Glengarry News 16 Aug. 1935 (as condensed by Ottawa Citizen) and 9 Aug. 1946 * is a speaker with Thomas D’Arcy McGee and others at “The Glengarry Demonstration” (location not stated), The Semi-Weekly Spectator (Hamilton, C. W.) 23 Oct. 1858 * Gordon family: Sinclair 23; cf. the passing undeveloped ref. to a “Dr. Grant,” in Glengarry School Days (p. 205 New Can. Library edn) * marriage of his 6th daughter, Mary Ann, The British American Journal [medical and scientific journal], III (1862) 351