xlviii. Proceedings of Royal Society of Edinhiirgh. 
William Aitken, he was seized with a sharp attack of jaundice, as 
soon as he could he was again at his post, remaining there through 
the winter of 1855-56, until the signing of Peace, in April 1856. 
For his services at the Battle of the Tchernaya he got the Sardinian 
medal, also the Turkish, and, we believe, was the only civil surgeon 
who received the English medal with clasp for Sebastopol, and on 
his return home he received a special gratuity from the Government 
for his services. He was also to have received the much coveted 
Legion of Honour, but, through some carelessness in making the 
return, he never got it. Leaving the Crimea in April 1856, he 
visited Palestine and Egypt, and before he reached England spent 
some time in Paris attending the Hospitals and renewing old friend- 
ships. On his return to Glasgow, in the autumn of 1856, being 
then but twenty-eight years old, he settled down to practice, and 
published, soon after his return, his Notes on the Surgery of 
the Crimean War, with Remarks upon Gunshot Wounds, a book 
which at once brought him into notice, attracting as it did a good 
deal of attention, and which even yet is recognised as one of the 
authorities upon the subject of which it treats. Besides the British 
edition, some 6000 copies were sold in America, and it was distri- 
buted by authority in both the Northern and Southern armies. 
But, though engaging in general practice, he was at heart a surgeon, 
and desired above all things to distinguish himself as a teacher. 
He therefore fitted up his dining-room as a lecture-room, and began 
a class of instruction in surgical apparatus — a subject which was 
not then taught even in the hospital. Encouraged by the success 
which attended this venture (for the first winter he had a class of 
thirty-two), he took a room the following winter in Cathedral Street, 
and announced a course of lectures in Systematic Surgery. Dr Eobert 
Hunter then occupied the Chair of Surgery in Anderson’s College, 
and though at first this rival class met with his opposition, he finally 
gave Macleod all the support he could. It was during this time 
that Macleod began to agitate, by pamphlets and otherwise, for 
certain reforms in the mode of clinical instruction, and of the 
appointment to office, then in vogue, in the hospital ; and, though in 
later life he might not altogether have approved of his own recom- 
mendations, yet the controversy did good, though he suffered the 
penalty of a reformer by his being kept out of the Infirmary for some 
