F. McKelvey (Frederick McKelvey) Bell

Born in 1878, Frederick McKelvey Bell was a Canadian physician who also wrote under the name F. McKelvey Bell. He served as a medical officer and became known for combining professional experience with an accessible writing style.

Bell wrote The First Canadians in France: The Chronicle of a Military Hospital in the War Zone in 1917, drawing on his service in the First World War. He also wrote A Romance of the Halifax Disaster in 1918, a rare novella inspired by the 1917 Halifax Explosion. Accounts of his life note that he assisted in the medical rescue after the explosion and chaired the medical relief committee, giving his fiction an unusually close link to real events.

He died on January 6, 1931, in New York. Though not a widely known literary figure today, his books offer an unusual window into wartime medicine, emergency response, and the human stories behind major moments in Canadian history.