Archibald Pitcairne

Archibald Pitcairne or Pitcairn (25 December 1652 – 20 October 1713) was a Scottish physician.

Pitcairne was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. After obtaining some classical education at the school of Dalkeith, Pitcairne entered Edinburgh University in 1668, and took his degree of MA in 1671. Having been sent to France for the benefit of his health, he was induced at Paris to begin the study of medicine, and after courses at Edinburgh and Paris he obtained in 1680 the degree of MD at Rheims.

He began practice at Edinburgh, and was appointed one of three professors of medicine in Edinburgh in 1685. In a short time acquired so great a reputation that in 1692 he was appointed professor of medicine at Leiden. Among his pupils were Richard Mead and George Cheyne and both of them attributed much of their skill to what they had learned from Pitcairne. The great Dutch physician Herman Boerhaave was once thought to have been a student of Pitcairne's, but is now known not to have been.

In 1693 Pitcairne returned to Scotland to marry a daughter of Sir Archibald Stevenson, an eminent physician in Edinburgh. The family objected to her going abroad, so he did not return to Leiden, but settled once more in Edinburgh. He rose to be the first physician in Scotland, and was frequently called into consultation both in England and the Netherlands.

Soon after his return to Edinburgh, feeling the great want of the means of anatomical study, he importuned the town council to permit himself and certain of his medical friends to treat without fee the sick paupers in Paul's Work, on condition of being allowed to dissect such of the bodies as were unclaimed by their relatives, and therefore had to be buried at the towns expense. Strangely enough this proposal was strongly opposed by the chief surgeons of the place, but ultimately the town council had the good sense to comply with Pitcairne's request, and in this way he may be said to have the credit of laying the foundation of the great Edinburgh school of medicine.

Pitcairne's medical opinions are chiefly contained in a volume of Dissertationes medicae which he published in 1701 (2nd ed. 1713). In these he discusses the application of geometry to physics, the circulation of the blood in the smaller vessels, the difference in the quantity of the blood contained in the lungs of animals in the womb and of the same animals after birth, the motions by which food becomes fit to supply the blood, the question as to inventors in medicine (in which he repels the idea of certain medical discoveries of modern times having been known to the ancients, especially vindicating for Harvey the discovery of the circulation of the blood, and refuting the view that it was known to Hippocrates), the cure of fevers by evacuating medicines, and the effects of acids and alkalis in medicine.

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