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Dr Andrew Duncan (1744-1828) was a remarkable medical figure during the Scottish Enlightenment whose influence continues to this day. His name lives on in the Andrew Duncan Clinic, established in 1965 as part of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital. Born the son of a Fife shipmaster, Duncan rose to become Physician to the King and was twice President of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. He saw the need for a Dispensary for the Sick Poor, and a Lunatic Asylum where inmates were treated humanely. A champion of public health, he founded, in the face of opposition, a Chair of Medical Jurisprudence and Public Health at the University of Edinburgh, the first in Britain. A man of wide interests, Duncan was a very sociable character with impressive organisational vigour who founded many societies and dining clubs including the Aesculapian and Harveian Societies, and the Royal Caledonian Horticultural Society, which still survive. He realised the value of exercise and founded a gymnastic club where, among other sports, he engaged in his favourite recreation of golf. He climbed Arthur's Seat regularly on the first of May until his 82nd year. Book jacket.
Each vol. issued with index to its own contents.
Definitive, concise, and very interesting... From William Shakespeare to Winston Churchill, the Very Interesting People series provides authoritative bite-sized biographies of Britain's most fascinating historical figures - people whose influence and importance have stood the test of time. Each book in the series is based upon the biographical entry from the world-famous Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
The essays in this volume, which range across Europe, America and Africa, and from the 18th to the 20th centuries, argue that the experience of travel, and the business of representing that experience, involved an obligatory engagement with the disturbing perception that travel's pleasures were inseparable from its dangers and ennuis. Despite the confidence of some medical authorities in their recommendations of the therapeutic benefits to be derived from ‘change of air' as a way of restoring a state of health, such opinions failed to establish a consensus, either amongst those who followed such peripatetic prescriptions, or amongst the medical professions in general. Mad doctors and clima...