Sketch of the early history of the medical profession in Edinburgh : being an address delivered at a conversazione in the hall of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, on 22d January 1864 / by John Gairdner, M.D.

  • Gairdner, John, 1790-1876.
Date:
1864
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sketch of the early history of the medical profession in Edinburgh : being an address delivered at a conversazione in the hall of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, on 22d January 1864 / by John Gairdner, M.D. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    number of the surgeons of this place to join the standard of Gustavus Adolplius, and of liis daughter after him. Alexander Penicuik and James Borthwick were two of these. They were intimate friends, and both were men of good families and of good fortunes. Of Borthwick I told you some things on the former occasion, and I must now introduce you to his friend, who became a member of the Surgeons some years before him, in 1640. He was the representative of a family which had possessed the estate of Penicuik for a period clearly traceable to the very earliest part of the sixteenth century,1 and which may have been in possession of it still earlier. He acquired the estate of Romanno, in the county of Peebles, through his mother, whose name was Murray, and who belonged to the family of Philiphaugh, in the adjoining county of Selkirk. He disposed of his family estate of Penicuik in 1647, and bought that of Newhall, on the southern borders of Mid-Lothian, in 1646. He died at Romanno at the age of 90, leaving both his estates to his son, who is known to the world as a poet, a physician, and a naturalist. He was himself also reputed to be a poet, though he has left no literary proof of the fact. He was surgeon to Banner, Queen Christina's general in the Swedish war, and was aftervv ards surgeon-general to the auxiliary Scotch army in England. His estate of Newhall became afterwards historically memorable as the scene of the celebrated pastoral of our Scottish Theocritus, Allan Ramsay. The cases of Penicuik and Borthwick are examples of a fact of which I could easily produce abundant evidence, that in the midst of the general poverty of the times, the Surgeons were not relatively poor. On the contrary, I have good reason to believe that both in wealth, and rank, and enterprise, they held as high, perhaps even a higher, place among the men of their own times, than the medical men of the present day among the men of the present generation.2 1 He or his father (but probably himself at an early age) is entered four times, viz., to his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grand- father, as the heir of Pennycuke.—Inquisitiones Generates, Nos. 493, 494, 495, 496. The four entries bear the same date, Sept. 21, 1610, and the four ancestors all bore the same name, John Pennycuke, de eodcm. Much of my information as to Penicuik is derived from the edition of his son's works, printed at Leith in 1815. In the minutes of the Surgeons he is sometimes called Newhall. The estate of Newhall went to his granddaughter, and to her husband Mr Oliphant, who sold it in 1703 to Sir D. Forbes, uncle of Duncan Forbes of Culloden. 2 From the records of Inquisitions regarding the possession of property m Scotland and other sources of information, I can prove that, of the first 150