David Skae

David Skae MD, FRCSEd (5 July 1814 – 18 April 1873) was a Scottish physician specialising in psychological medicine.

[3] At sixteen years of age he left St Andrews to take up a post as a clerk in a lawyer's office in Edinburgh.

He made insanity his special study, approaching it from the point of view of a student of nervous and mental physiology.

In 1846 he obtained the appointment of physician superintendent of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum at Morningside, and held the post till his death, twenty-seven years later.

A number of his lectures (some of the very earliest of their kind ever given in Britain) have been collected and are today held within the archives of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

He died at his official residence at Tipperlinn House in Morningside, Edinburgh, of oesophageal cancer, on 18 April of that year.

He made this topic the subject of an address which he delivered at the Royal College of Physicians, London, on the occasion of his occupying the presidential chair of the Association of Medical Officers of Asylums (9 July 1863); and he further developed it in the Morisonian lectures on insanity, 1873.