In the immediate neighbourhood of Edinburgh a leper station probably existed at a date greatly earlier than that of the Greenside Hospital. In his _Caledonia_,[39] the late excellent antiquary and philologist, George Chalmers, expresses his belief in the opinion suggested by the Rev. Mr. White, that the name of the village of Liberton (two miles south of Edinburgh) is merely a corruption of Liper town,—liper being the old Scotch term for leprosy; and, as is well known, the letters _p_ and _b_ being constantly interchanged for one another in the composition and transmutation of words. This idea is certainly in no small degree countenanced by the circumstance that the lands of Upper Liberton (Libertune) in some old writs are described under the name of “terrarum de Spittle town” (Hospital town.)[40] Besides, the “Oily or Balm Well of St. Catherine’s at Liberton,” had been long held in high estimation in curing cutaneous diseases, and still maintained great repute as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In his brief but interesting _Cosmography and Description of Albion_, Boece, Canon of Aberdeen, at the commencement of the sixteenth century, states that the oil of this well “valet contra varias cutis scabricies.”—_Historiæ Scotorum_ (1526), p. xi.[41] J. Monipennie alleges that its oil or “fatness is of a sudain operation to heal all salt scabs and humors that trouble the outward skin of man.”[42] Dr. Hare makes mention of it to the same purpose.[43] After the institution of the monastery of St. Catherine of Sienna (_Scotticé_, Sheens) on the Burrow Moor, at a short distance south of the city walls of Edinburgh, the Dominican nuns belonging to it made, in honour of St. Catherine, an annual solemn procession to the chapel and balm well of Liberton.[44] This “oily or balm well” of Liberton was sufficient to excite the admiration and engage the protective care of the credulous King James VI. In a curious monograph[45] on the virtues of the well, published at Edinburgh in 1664, the author, “Mathew Mackaile, Chirurgo-Medicine.” indulges himself (p. 117) in the following historical eulogium and anathema in regard to it:— “His Majesty King James the Sixth, the first monarch of Great Britain, of blessed memory, had such a great estimation of this rare well, that when he returned from England to visit this his ancient kingdom of Scotland in anno 1617, he went in person to see it, and ordered that it should be built with stones from the bottom to the top, and that a door and a pair of stairs should be made for it, that men might have the more easie access unto its bottom for getting of the oyl. This royal command being obeyed, the well was adorned and preserved, until the year 1650, when that execrable regicide and usurper, Oliver Cromwell, with his rebellious and sacrilegious accomplices, did invade this kingdom, and not only deface such rare and ancient monuments of Nature’s handwork, but also the synagogues of the God of nature.”