Page:Stewart 1879 On the teaching of medicine in Edinburgh University.djvu/8

6 native doctors was not then very high. Doubtless a consciousness of the defects of home training stimulated candidates for medical honours to visit foreign seats of learning, and led not a few Scotchmen, towards the end of the sixteenth and throughout the seventeenth centuries, to Leyden, and Paris, and Rheims, and Padua, and Wittemberg.

Sir Robert Sibbald, who had been one of the principal agents in getting the charter for the Royal College of Physicians, was, in 1685, appointed by the Town Council the first Professor of Medicine in the University. Later in the same year Dr. James Halkett and Dr. Archibald Pitcairn were appointed professors, that they might unite their efforts with those of Sir Robert in teaching the science of medicine. Apparently they did not accomplish much as teachers, for the only token of Sir Robert's activity which Bower, the historian of the University, was able to find, consisted in an advertisement in the Edinburgh Courant of 14th February, 1706, in which it was stated when the course was to commence, that it was to be delivered in Latin, and that none would be admitted but such as understood Latin and Greek. From the wording of the advertisement it appears that he did not teach in the College, but in his own house, which was situated in Carrubber's Close, High Street. Probably he perceived clearly enough the advantages that would follow the establishment of a medical school in Edinburgh University, but he could not, even with the assistance he had secured, succeed in establishing it. There is no evidence that Dr. Porterfield, who was elected Professor of the Theory and Practice of Physic in 1724, ever delivered lectures; and it was not till four young physicians, who had been educated abroad, made a fresh start in the teaching of medicine, that anything was accomplished.

In 1720, these four young men—Dr. Andrew Sinclair, a graduate of Angers; Dr. John Rutherford, a graduate of Rheims; Dr. Andrew Plummer, a graduate of Leyden; and Dr. John Innes, a graduate of Padua, began, with the approval of the Town Council, to teach the theory and practice of medicine and chemistry in rooms connected with the old hall of the College of Surgeons, where the first Monro had taught anatomy before he was transferred to the University. After a few years' work outside, the four teachers, upon their petition, supported by