ii THE EDINBURGH MEDICAL SCHOOL 13 



from Leyden in 1693 fired with the ambition to set up a 

 school in Edinburgh that should rival that of the Dutch 

 university. He saw that such a school must be founded 

 upon the study of anatomy, and he put forward Menteith 

 and others year after year in attempts to induce the town 

 to give the needed facilities. But all his efforts were in 

 vain. It was not until the Monros came on the scene 

 that anything was done. Alexander Monro was the first 

 of the three teachers of that name, who between them 

 held the chair of anatomy at Edinburgh in continuity for 

 the long period of 126 years. He was trained by his 

 father from his youth to take this place, and had every 

 advantage which money or influence could obtain. He 

 learned anatomy of Cheselden and Douglas in London ; 

 at Leyden he studied under Albinus, and was a favourite 

 pupil of Boerhaave. His father's efforts collected fifty- 

 seven students to hear his first course of lectures, which 

 he delivered in the old Surgeons' Hall in 1720, when he 

 was but twenty-two years of age ; he made his mark as 

 a teacher at the very outset, and he taught an ever- 

 increasing class for thirty-eight years. " He had to do 

 a new thing in Edinburgh, to teach anatomy and to 

 provide for the study of it in a half-civilised and politically- 

 disturbed country ; he had to gather in students, to 

 persuade others to join with him in teaching, and to get 

 an infirmary built. All this he did " ; and thus " this 

 great and good man earned the title of father of the 

 Edinburgh Medical School." * 



When Fothergill came to Edinburgh in 1734 the school 

 had been organised for scarcely ten years. Around 

 Monro had been gathered five members of the College of 

 Physicians Rutherford, Alston, Sinclair, Plummer, and 

 Innes. All these had been, like Monro, pupils of Boer- 

 haave, so that the school owed its parentage to the alma 



staff of St. Bartholomew's Hospital, as well as that young midshipman, by 

 the irony of fate the most famous of the four, whose name was given to 

 Pitcairn's Island. 



1 Struthers, Historical Sketch of the Edinburgh Anatomical School, p. 26. 

 See also Dr. Norman Moore's Fitzpatrick Lectures, 1906 ; and Dalziel, History 

 of the University of Edinburgh. 



