Ruttan, Robert Fulford

  • DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ARTICLE: Robert V. V. Nicholls, “RUTTAN, ROBERT FULFORD,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 15, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/ruttan_robert_fulford_15E.html
  • DCB profile notes:
    • Chemist, university professor and administrator, and office holder; b. 15 July 1856 in Newburgh, Upper Canada, son of Dr Allan Ruttan and Caroline Smith; d. unmarried 19 Feb. 1930 in Montreal.
    • His family moved to Napanee, Upper Canada, around 1863. Ruttan graduated from the local collegiate institute in 1877 and enrolled in the honours course in natural science at the University of Toronto. There he acquired a lifelong enthusiasm for chemistry and biology and obtained a ba in 1881, winning a gold medal.
    • At that time there were few opportunities in Canada to pursue a career, academic or industrial, in chemistry, so Ruttan registered in medicine at McGill College, Montreal. He graduated md in 1884, receiving the Sutherland Gold Medal in chemistry and the Morrice scholarship in physiology.
    • Ruttan never practised medicine. Seeking to perfect his knowledge by postgraduate studies in organic chemistry, he travelled to Europe and spent two years working under August Wilhelm von Hofmann at the University of Berlin. Rather, Ruttan’s main contributions to chemistry were as a teacher and administrator. He had benefited greatly from his exposure to Hofmann’s brilliance as lecturer and demonstrator. “As teacher of chemistry,” Macallum would later note, Ruttan “had few equals.”
    • Immediately on his return to Canada in 1886 Ruttan was appointed lecturer in chemistry in the faculty of medicine at McGill. Among Ruttan’s ambitions was a desire to have chemistry recognized in Canada as a profession and to ensure that industrial chemistry was provided with the means to be effective across the nation. In 1920 he helped to found the Canadian Institute of Chemistry, incorporated the following year as a society of professionals. As president-elect of the British Society of Chemical Industry (a Canadian section had been formed in 1902), he arranged for it to hold its annual meeting in Montreal in 1921, outside Great Britain for the first time since its founding in 1881.
  • Great Grandson of United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=7234
  • Find a Grave: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/108193771/robert-fulford-ruttan