Alexander Milton Ross

Alexander Milton Ross was a Canadian physician, naturalist and abolitionist who earned his medical degree in 1855 and practiced medicine while pursuing an extensive second career in natural history. Using ornithology as a cover, he traveled through the American South before the Civil War posing as a bird collector while secretly informing enslaved people of escape routes north, work that made him a notable agent of the Underground Railroad. Later in life, during a smallpox epidemic in Montreal in the 1880s, Ross became a prominent and vocal opponent of compulsory vaccination, founding the Canadian Anti-Vaccination League in 1885 and arguing instead for sanitation, isolation and quarantine measures to control the disease. His medical career thus spanned mainstream general practice, wartime humanitarian activism and a public campaign against one of the era's central public health policies.