‘The good-natured size of his person and set of his face, seem to show that Philosophy is not the thing of toil and anguish it once was to men.’—ROBERT W. BARBOUR. From an Aberdeen education at the Grammar School to begin with, and afterwards at King’s College, where he learned his Latinity, John Gregory came to Edinburgh in 1742. He came with his mother to look after him, who, poor soul, was haunted by the remembrance of his brother George’s early death, and would hardly let John out of her sight. Both of the boy’s guardians had agreed that for a medical education he must attend Edinburgh University. His brother, the mediciner in Aberdeen, never seems to have suggested that he should stay there, where there was really no systematic teaching of medicine, nor did his grandfather, Principal Chalmers, the Principal of King’s College. To begin his study at Edinburgh, to continue it at Leyden, was the best suggestion that they could offer him, and it turned out excellently. His professors in Edinburgh were Professor Monro, (the first), who daily strove to make dry bones live, and succeeded; Professor Sinclair, who expressed Boerhaave’s teaching in his own very beautiful Latin; Dr Rutherford, the grandfather of Sir Walter Scott, who taught the Practice of Physic, and Dr Alston, the strangeness of whose prescriptions makes it possible for us to grasp what an advance Cullen and Gregory accomplished in medicine. These were very nearly the same professors as lectured when Goldsmith attended the university some ten years afterwards, and he did not think much of any of them, except Professor Monro, to whom he gave his heart’s admiration. ‘This man,’ he wrote, ‘has brought the science he teaches to as much perfection as it is capable of; ‘tis he, I may venture to say, that draws hither such a number of students from most parts of the world, even from Russia.’ As for Professor Alston, he has left behind him the notes of his lectures, and they are very curious, though not laughable, for after all it was what everyone believed in those days. ‘Earthworms, large and fat ones especially, were dried and used in cases of jaundice and gout: the juice of slaters passed through a muslin bag was recommended for cancer, convulsions and headache.’ But, all the same, think of John Gregory taking notes of such teaching, sitting up late at night to write down how vipers must be used for ague and small-pox, and picture his watching the cure of the lady with a headache who could be induced to drink the wood-lice-juice. No wonder she was cured when you think what faith she must have brought to her physician.