Archibald Pitcairne

On returning to Edinburgh, however, around 1693, he was suspected of being at heart an atheist, chiefly on account of his mockery of the puritanical strictness of the Presbyterian church.

[2] Soon after his return to Edinburgh, Pitcairne made an offer to the town council that would see him and some of his colleagues treat paupers for free at the hospital of Paul's Work at the foot of Calton Hill.

Pitcairne was close friends with mathematician David Gregory, with whom he wrote mathematical papers, which in turn informed his hypothesis that Newtonian physics more accurately described bodily functions than the balance of humours.

[6] Pitcairne was a good classical scholar, and wrote Latin verses, occasionally with something more than mere imitative cleverness and skill.

He was the joint author of a comedy, The Assembly, or Scotch Reformation, originally entitled The Phanaticks (1691),[7] and of a satirical poem Babel, containing witty sketches of prominent Presbyterian divines of the time, whom, as a loudly avowed Jacobite, he strongly disliked.

[7] The work circulated as a closet drama and was never performed on stage in Pitcairne's lifetime, its satirisation of Presbyterianism being considered too scurrilous.

He was repeatedly involved in violent quarrels with his medical brethren and others, and once or twice got into scrapes with the government on account of his indiscreet political utterances.

[2] When a son of Pitcairne's participated in the Jacobite rising of 1715 and was subsequently condemned to death, he was saved by the earnest interposition of Mead with Sir Robert Walpole.

He pleaded, very artfully, that if Walpole's health had been bettered by Mead's skill, or if members of the royal family were preserved by his care, it was owing to the instruction he had received from Dr Pitcairne.