Born at Blackstock, Ontario, son of Stewart and Isabella Bruce, he was educated at Perry High School and the University of Toronto where he graduated with the gold medal in the MD. He then came to England to take his FRCS, the second Canadian to do so, and after postgraduate study in Paris, Berlin and Vienna, on his return to Canada he was in due course elected surgeon to the Toronto General Hospital in 1909, later becoming Professor of Clinical Surgery in the University. In his early years of practice he achieved note in the treatment of appendicitis by surgery. In 1911 he was President of the Ontario Medical Association, and from its foundation in 1913 was a regent of the American College of Surgeons. In 1915 he was elected Vice-President of the Congress of Surgeons of North America, and in 1916 President of the Academy of Medicine. During the 1914-18 war he joined the Canadian Army Medical Corps Expeditionary Force in 1915, and in July 1916 was promoted Inspector-General of the Canadian Medical Service. He resigned this post as a protest and went to France in 1917, having been appointed consulting surgeon to the British Forces with the rank of Colonel, which post he held until the end of the war. In 1918 the British Government sent him as a delegate to the meeting of the American Medical Association in Chicago in company with Sir Arbuthnot Lane and Sir James Mackenzie. He was an outstanding surgeon and a public-spirited citizen of transparent honesty and straightforwardness. In politics he served in the Provincial Parliament of Ontario and the National Parliament at Ottawa, becoming Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario in 1932 until 1937. He refused to support actions he considered wrong, and in 1938 incurred considerable odium for opposing the demand that unqualified practitioners should be permitted to use the title "doctor". In 1919 he had written "Politics of the Canadian Army Medical Corps" which raised a storm of criticism by its exposure of many defects in the service. He was a member of the Canadian House of Commons for the duration of the war in 1939-45. In 1958 he published his memoirs under the title *Varied Operations*. Gentle and courteous in manner, his recreations were riding and golf and the farming of his 400 acre estate on Bayview Heights. He married in 1919 Angela Hall, daughter of a Cornwall manufacturer, whom he met during his overseas service, and by whom he had a son. He died at his home, Arrandale, on 23 June 1963.