In Living and Learning in Retirement’s 50th year, Ted Barris continues his Friday lectures this winter at Glendon College’s Centre for Excellence. His series, “Missing in Action: Untold Stories of Canadians’ Participation in Historic Moments,” features famous periods of world history, in which Canadians played vital roles.

Lecture No. 9. “Their motto was ‘that others may live.’” A study of a family relative who served as a front-line medic in WWII sparked this presentation. When all hell is breaking loose in a battlefield, what would possess an individual not to run away, but to rush toward the danger? This talk explores the experiences of Canadian and other medics, surgeons, nursing sisters and ambulance drivers who disregard their own well-being to save the lives of others on the battlefield. The talk takes us from the first gas attacks in 1915 in the Great War, to the jungles of Burma in WWII, to the mythology of military medicine in Korea to the war zones of Iraq.

Ted Barris has published 20 non-fiction books, half of them wartime histories. His book, The Great Escape: A Canadian Story, won the 2014 Libris Award as Best Non-Fiction Book in Canada. His book, Dam Busters: Canadian Airmen and the Secret Raid Against Nazi Germany, received the 2018 NORAD Trophy from the RCAF Association. And his book, Rush to Danger: Medics in the Line of Fire, was long-listed for the 2020 Charles Taylor Prize for Non-Fiction in Canada. In December 2022, Ted Barris was appointed Member of the Order of Canada.