Drummond, Stanley P.

Stanley Peter Drummond, S.J. was a Jesuit and biology professor. Born in 1913 in Guelph, Ontario, he entered the St. Stanislaus Jesuit Noviciate in 1931. After completing his regency studies in philosophy, he pursued an MA at the University of Toronto. He graduated in 1942 upon the submission of his thesis entitled “Vascularity in the Brains of Summer and Hibernating Frogs.” He would later obtain his PhD at the same university in 1962 (“Quantitative Cerebral Vascularity in the Active and Hibernating Ground Squirrel”). He was ordained to the priesthood in 1945.

In 1946, Drummond was hired by Loyola College to establish a Biology Department. Drummond, who had already been an assistant teacher there in the early 1940s, was the department’s first chairman. He created a curriculum, acquired equipment, and built tables and shelves for the lab. Over the years, his lab became renowned in Montreal and was well sought-after by McGill pre-med students. Many of them would eventually pursue careers in the medical field, as can attest the correspondence Drummond kept with students after they had graduated. Drummond taught fulltime until 1978 and then part-time until he retired in 1994.

Drummond served different administrative positions throughout the 1970s and 1980s at Loyola College, which was integrated to Concordia University in 1974. He founded Loyola’s bookstore and printing services. Other duties and activities he took on included chapel services, unofficial infirmarian and house librarian at the Loyola Jesuit residence, as well as protector of the Bernard Collection (Inuit artefacts).

Drummond moved to the René Goupil House (Pickering, Ontario) in 2008. He died in 2012. He was in his 99th year of life and had served 81 years in the Society of Jesus.