28 February 1923 diary of Dr John Stewart Muir (1845-1938) of Selkirk

Same dull damp sunless weather: fair till 2 + rain after : heavy at night. Calm : no snow visible on Linglie but numerous wreaths on Selkirk Hill. Saw some cases walking + gave Chlor[oform] for case of appendicitis (Mrs Douglas¹, Heatherlie [?]). Motored to Faldonside, Hospital + Henhouse. Wrote Thin² (re expense of guests at last Friday’s dinner³), Caird⁴ (who sent me some original verses), Margaret Boyd⁵ + Bramwell.⁶ Got combination that Robert Currie⁷ got made for me at Hawick.⁸

¹ Mrs Douglas is so far unidentified.

² Assume Robert Thin (1861-1941), M.B., F.R.CP.Ed., LL.D., medical practitioner, living at 25 Abercromby Place, Edinburgh, 1921 Census. The youngest surviving son of James Thin, master bookseller, and Catherine Thin née Traquair, he started his career as house surgeon to Professor John Chiene, was then House Physician to Dr John Wylie at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, Lauriston Place, before moving to the Sick Children’s Hospital, Edinburgh and later to general practice, he was President of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, 1931-1933.

³ If expense is the correct reading it is not clear what the question might be but there is a description of the clinical meeting of the Edinburgh Branch of the British Medical Association and a brief reference to the dinner in “Scotland” The British Medical Journal, vol. 1, no. 3250, 1923, pp. 653–653. JSTOR, accessed 23 Feb. 2023.

⁴ Assume Professor Francis Mitchell Caird (1853-1926), F.R.C.S.Ed., Scottish surgeon who was an early advocate of Listerian antisepsis and then asepsis and pioneer of gastrointestinal surgery. Regius Professor of Clinical Surgery at the University of Edinburgh, 1908-1919, and was President of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, 1912-1914.

⁵ Margaret Boyd (if that reading is correct) is so far unidentified and nobody with a similar name was referred to in the report of The British Medical Journal noted above.

⁶ Assume Professor Edwin ‘Ed’ Bramwell (1873-1952), M.B., Ch.B., F.R.C.P.E., Scottish neurologist, specialist in brain injuries and shell-shock and President of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, 1933-1935.

⁷ The likeliest matches are either Robert Currie ‘junior’ (about 1847-1923) or Robert Currie (1874-1934), woollen hosiery manufacturers. They were the fourth and fifth of five generations of Curries at Selkirk with the given name Robert.

⁸ Presumably through Currie’s connections to the hosiery trade. Hawick was the dominant centre of hosiery manufacturing although even by the 1860s firms such as William Watson and Sons were dropping hosiery manufacture in favour of weaving. Others however stuck with hosiery, as shown in the 1914-18 War image below.