Doctor Thomas Neill Cream:

by David Fennario

In 1876, Jack the Ripper, otherwise known as Canadian Doctor Thomas Neill Cream, graduated with merit from McGill’s faculty of medicine. Cream was a backstreet abortionist and managed an exclusive brothel called The Elite Club. His notorious reputation eventually forced him to flee Canada for London. He was hanged in 1892 for the murder of four prostitutes.

Doctor Thomas Neill Cream mixes fact and speculation with its cast of unlikely characters: khaki-covered union organizers—the good guys; five white-faced “zombies” representing such illustrious “Founding Fathers of Confederation” and distinguished members of the McGill fraternity as Sir Hugh Allan, Sir William Dawson, Sir William Osier and Lord Strathcona—the victors; and their young prostitutes—the victims.

Intended as a cultural exorcism, playwright David Fennario charges with murder the capitalists who are now paraded through our history books as nation-builders. Past evil is paralleled in the present.

112 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

David William Fennario, (born David Wiper) is a Canadian playwright best known for Balconville (1979), his bilingual dramatization of life in working-class Montreal, for which he won the Floyd S. Chalmers Canadian Play Award. A committed Marxist, Fennario was a candidate for the Union des forces progressistes in 2003 and for Québec solidaire in 2007. He has been the subject of two National Film Board of Canada documentaries, David Fennario's Banana Boots and Fennario: His World On Stage.

His pen name, "Fennario," given to him by a former girlfriend, is from a Bob Dylan song, Pretty Peggy-O.