Pitcairne

Pitcairne, ARCHIBALD, physician and satirist, was born at Edinburgh, 25th December 1652. He studied first theology and then law at the univer- sity of his native city; but having gone to France in ill-health, made final choice of medicine as his life study, completing a distinguished course at Paris. He practised with success in Edinburgh till 1692, when the fame of his treatise on Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood secured him a call to Leyden as professor. Here he remained only a year; his lectures being ultimately published as Elementa Medicinæ Physico-Mathematica (1718). He returned to Edinburgh to become one of the most famous physicians of his time; producing also Dissertationes Medicæ (1701). But he was even more notorious as a Jacobite, an Episcopalian, a satirist of Presbyterian men and things, and, according to his opponents, as an atheist and scoffing at religion. The Assembly is a comedy in ridicule of the General Assembly of the kirk; and Babell, or the Assembly (1692), is a poem with the same aim. His Latin verses, some of which were republished by Ruddiman in 1727, are creditable. He died 20th October 1713.