Andrew Duncan (physician, born 1744)

Andrew Duncan, the elder, was a British physician and professor at the University of Edinburgh, born at Pinkerton near St Andrews in 1744 and dead in 1828, and a joint founder of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He studied under Joseph Black, William Cullen and Alexander Monro secundus, served as surgeon on an East India Company ship to China in 1768 and graduated MD at St Andrews in 1769. He ran extra-academical courses, in 1773 began Medical and Philosophical Commentaries, the first regularly published medical review journal in Great Britain, and in 1776 founded Edinburgh first Public Dispensary. As first proposer of an asylum in Edinburgh he gave his name to the Andrew Duncan Clinic of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital, and he gave the first lectures on forensic medicine in Britain. He was president of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in 1790 and later first Physician to the King in Scotland.