Page:Memoir of Dr James Alexander (1795-1863), Wooler by his son-in-law, Sir John Struthers, 1863.pdf/1

 was born about the year 1795 in Dunfermline, where his father was a surgeon. Both his father and mother, whose only child he was, were above the average in talent, and he used to speak of his mother as a person of unusual cultivation. He studied medicine in Edinburgh, and among his teachers were John Gordon, Andrew Duncan, Home, Hope, Hamilton, and James Gregory. He took his surgeon's diploma in 1815, and among his examiners on the occasion appears the name of Dr Abercrombie, with whom he formed an intimacy which lasted for life. Finding that he must endeavour at once to get some position where he could maintain himself, he had to relinquish his ardent desire to fight his way in Edinburgh, and the chance of circumstances led to his being fixed for life in the remote district where he worked so long. He went to Wooler first as the partner of Mr Cupples, the partnership continuing till the death of the latter. He married very soon after he went to Wooler, and Mrs Alexander, like himself from Dunfermline, proved throughout life to him and his children the most devoted and unselfish of wives and mothers. She survived him a year. With much domestic happiness he had his domestic sorrows, in the death of three of his children, losing his eldest daughter of scarlet fever at the age of seven, his eldest son after he had commenced the study of medicine, and his youngest son, who had entered the army as a surgeon, died of cholera in India.

The district of Glendale in which Mr Alexander practised, with Wooler as its centre, is essentially a rural one. An extensive, fertile, and beautiful valley, watered by the Till and some of its tributaries, divided for the most part into large and highly