Professional feuds already became prominent in Edinburgh. The surgeon-apothecaries were jealous of the physicians and doctors of medicine. Several abortive efforts were made by the latter towards the establishment of a College of Physicians. In 1621 King James gave a warrant to the Scottish Parliament for this purpose; but no action was taken. In 1630 the subject was referred to the Privy Council. In 1656 Cromwell constituted a College of Physicians for Scotland; but his death prevented its completion. Thus it was not till Sibbald and Stevenson, by the aid of Sir Charles Scarborough, Harvey’s friend, gained the ear of the Duke of York, that at last the College of Physicians of Edinburgh was founded, in 1681, notwithstanding the strong opposition of the surgeons and the townsmen. Soon after this, in 1685, the Town Council of Edinburgh appointed three principal members of the College of Physicians to be Professors of Medicine in what they now for the first time, at any rate in existing documents, called “the university of this city.” Sir Robert Sibbald was appointed Professor of Physic, and rooms were allotted to him, but not a salary. Drs. Halket and Pitcairne were speedily added to the list of professors, and the division of duties between the professors was left to themselves. We have no record of any lectures given by these professors for a long period, but we know that Pitcairne in 1692-3 held a professorship at Leyden. On his return to Edinburgh he became enthusiastic in promoting the medical school, aiding Alexander Monteith in gaining permission from the Town Council to dissect the bodies of people who died in “Paul’s Work.” “We offer,” says Pitcairne, “to wait on these poor for nothing, and bury them after dissection at our own charges, which now the town does; yet there is great opposition by the chief surgeons, who neither eat hay nor suffer the oxen to eat it. I do propose, if this be granted, to make better improvements in anatomy than have been in Leyden these thirty years.”