ABERDEEN DOCTORS AT HOME AND ABROAD.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume X, Issue 22, 3 June 1893, Page 517

ABERDEEN DOCTORS AT HOME AND ABROAD.

WE have recently received for review, from Messrs Blackwood and Sons, a work entitled * Aberdeen Doctors at Home and Abroad : The Narrative of a Medical School,’ by Ella Hill Burton Rodger. As the title sufficiently indicates, the book does not treat of a subject which can have very much interest for the general reader, and the more closely definitive sub-title certainly does not suggest scope for the play of a witty pen and a graceful fancy. Wit and fancy are not precisely the qualities that are to be got out of the dry records of a medical school. If the ‘ Humours of a Medical School ’ ever came to be chronicled, we strongly suspect they would be found to have a strictly physiological reference. Yet, notwithstanding, Mrs Rodger manages to introduce a large amount of humorous matter into her work, though the Medical Society records are not accountable for it. The most popular chapters in the book will, no doubt, lie those on the ‘ resurrection days.’ There is a gruesome attraction about this subject for most people, and Aberdeen had her own resurrection • sensations,’ though they were happily not of the kind by which Burke, of the infamous • firm ’ of Burke and Hare, enriched the English language with a new word. It must be apparent to all who read Mrs Rodger’s work that the author can have had no easy task to perform in acquiring, selecting, and arranging the minute information with regard to Aberdeen doctors, in the far and near past and in the present, which makes the material of her book. She is to be congratulated on the creditable manner in which she has done her work, and her publishers on the excellent guise in which they have presented it to the public. Medical men generally will, doubtless, take an interest in the record of the rise and progress of a medical school, and Aberdonians all over the world are sure to look with favour on a book dealing with the vicissitudes and successes of an institution most creditable to their native town. It has been remarked, more than once, we believe, —that the Scotch are patriotic. They are. Even when they are flourishing better in other countries than in their own—which they have an ingenious habit of doing—they will persist in regarding themselves as exiles while out of

Scotland. The more narrowly their patriotism is localised, the more perfervid does it become, so that their native town or village appears, to a good few of them in distant lands, a sort of Jerusalem to which, if they spoil the Egyptians with sufficient thoughtful pertinacity, they hope kind heaven may permit them to return some day. Even here in this benignly-placed young city on the Waitemata, with its Italian skies and soft, caressing climate, it is more than probable that some Aberdonian exiles are ‘ hankering after’ that greyold granite seaport beyond the Scottish Grampians, where sleet, and hail, and snow, and roaring north-easters are not unknown. To many of these the names of the people and places appearing in Mrs Rodger’s book will likely be • familiar in their mouths as household words,’ and lecall pleasant reminiscences of the auld lang syne passed in • the silver city by the northern sea.’ The author’s account of the Aberdeen Medical Society shows that, like most things destined to endure and wax strong, it was not a special creation from without, inaugurated by processional marchings and the blowing of trumpets, but a spontaneous natural growth. Towards the end of the last century twelve young medical students from Marischall College—some of whom afterwards highly distinguished themselves in wide spheres of medical activity—feeling sorely the need of a medical school in their native town, founded the Aberdeen Medical Society in the form of a sort of debating school for mutual benefit. It grew slowly but surely as the years went on, and gained, inch by inch, a standing ground of distinction for itself. Mrs Rodger describes to us, in simple, unornate language well suited to her subject, the doctors and students connected at different times with the Medical Society, and she never seeks to give a fictitious colour to the naturally sober-toned hues of her pictures of them and their environment.

Those Aberdeen doctors, who seem generally to have more than made up by native ability for what little they might lack in the way of professional education, were apparently a long beaded, clear-seeing race, plain and direct in speech, and as strong to endure and repel the buffets of adverse fortune as the grey granite crags of their birthplace the might of the wild North Sea. It would seem, too, that there must have been few of their kind across the

border, from the almost certain success which appears to have attended those worthy men, who, forsaking the narrower possibilities of a medical career in the b'.eak north, tried to push their fortunes in London. We discover—will Aberdonians forgive us if we add ‘ with some surprise f—that the owners of many names, familiar to us as those of widely-celebrated medical men, come from the old University town on the Dee. Most prominent among those names is that of Sir James M'Gregor, who, as Medical Director of the Allied Forces in the Peninsular War, set Wellington’s sick army on its legs again. What strikes one most pleasantly and forcibly about those same successful medical men is their strong attachment to Aberdeen. Though when in quest of fortune they turned their backs on their birthplace, they were ever ready, when fortune had been found, to let their ‘ ain toon partake of their prosperity by bestowing gifts of money on her colleges and other institutions. Rut they were sometimes wofnlly clannish, and it used to be told of one highly distinguished Aberdeen medico that, when he was First Director of the British Medical Board, he bad two lists, one for members of the Aberdeen Medical Society, and another for ‘ other Aberdonians.’ Money endowments to their university could not fail to be most acceptable to Aberdonians, for everywhere in Scotland learning, like literature, has generally had to be cultivated on a little oatmeal—though the condition of learning and literature in that country does not make by any means a bad advertisement of oatmeal. After all, the frugal way of living, which seems to have been characteristic of the Aberdeen student, at least of a generation or two ago, did the lad no harm. It was, indeed, a sort of inoculation against dire poverty, and gave him advantages over more luxuriously-bred men when he and they had to cope with that evil on the lowest rung of the ladder which they had to fight their way up. As a truthful and kindly written record of the medical community of Aberdeen in past and present times, Mrs Rodger’s book is well worth being read, and the anecdotes, which enliven its sober pages, teud to make one think very pleasantly of human nature—especially of human nature as it is made on the banks of the Dee and Don.