Founding of McGill University

McGill University in Montreal was founded under a royal charter granted by King George IV, thanks to the bequest of the Scottish-born fur trader and merchant James McGill, who left land and money to establish a college. Teaching began in its early years with the medical faculty, which became one of the foremost in North America and where Sir William Osler later worked. The university grew on the slope of Mount Royal into a leading English-language research university in Canada, with a strong tradition of science, including Ernest Rutherford's work on radioactivity in the early twentieth century. Many Nobel Prize winners have been associated with it. Its fame led it to be called the Harvard of the North.

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