The conference commenced with a request in gentle terms from the provost, that the people might be brought forward, and in this request Mr Park very civilly joined. An altercation then took place between the major and the town-clerk, the former calling the latter a fool, the latter in return calling the major an ass, who, then losing patience, struck the man of peace with his cane. A heavy blow of the fist of the town-clerk was instantly replied to by the major with a lunge of his sword, whereupon Mr Park fell dead at his feet.
There was immediately a great hubbub in the chamber, and it soon spread to the streets, into which Menzies rushed without hat or wig, and with the bloody sword in his hand. He called his men—he planted them three-deep across the chief line of street, to stop the mob, and, mounting his horse at the Gorbals, fled amain.
Mr Francis Montgomery, a member of the Privy Council, was in Glasgow at the time. He readily concurred with the magistrates in authorising three citizens to pursue the murderer. They were John Anderson of Dowhill,[[132]] John Gillespie, merchant, and Robert Stevenson, glazier. As they travelled along the line of the Clyde on Menzies’s track, they were joined by Peter Paterson, late bailie of Renfrew. Anderson alone was armed; he had two pistols.
The unfortunate major was traced to the house of Rainhill, where, entering the garden, the pursuers soon found him. Gillespie, who had got one of Anderson’s pistols, accompanied by Stevenson, advanced upon the murderer, who came up with a fierce |1694.| countenance, asking what was the matter. Paterson told him there had been a man slain in Glasgow, and the murderer was supposed to be here: ‘If you be he,’ added Paterson, ‘may God forgive you!’ Menzies replied: ‘It is no business of yours;’ whereupon one of the others called out: ‘Dowhill, here is the man.’ Then the major, drawing his sword, and using a horrible imprecation, came forward, crying: ‘What have the rascals to do with me?’ The men retreated before him, and a pistol was fired in self-defence, by which Menzies was slain. When Paterson returned a minute after, he found him lying on his back, dead, with his drawn sword across his breast.
Strange to say, Henry Fletcher, brother of Lord Salton, and Lieutenant-colonel Hume, for the interest of his majesty’s forces, raised a prosecution against the three Glasgow citizens for murder. It ended in a verdict of Not proven.[[133]]
Oct.
Previous to 1705, when the first professor of anatomy was appointed in the university of Edinburgh, there were only a few irregular attempts in the Scottish capital to give instructions in that department of medical education. We first hear of dissection of the dead body in our city in the latter part of the year 1694, a little before which time the celebrated Dr Archibald Pitcairn had left a distinguished position as professor of medicine in the university of Leyden, and marrying an Edinburgh lady, had been induced finally to settle there in practice. On the 14th October, Pitcairn wrote to his friend, Dr Robert Gray of London, that he was taking part in an effort to obtain subjects for dissection from the town-council, requesting from them the bodies of those who die in the correction-house called Paul’s Work, and have none to bury them. ‘We offer,’ he says, ‘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 made at Leyden these thirty years; for I think most or all anatomists have neglected or not known what was most useful for a physician.’
The person ostensibly moving in this matter was Mr Alexander Monteith, an eminent surgeon, and a friend of Pitcairn. In compliance with his request, the town-council (October 24) gave |1694.| him a grant of the dead bodies of those dying in the correction-house, and of foundlings who die on the breast, allowing at the same time a room for dissection, and freedom to inter the remains in the College Kirk cemetery, but stipulating that he bury the intestines within forty-eight hours, and the remainder of the body within ten days, and that his prelections should only be during the winter half of the year.
Monteith’s brethren did not present any opposition to his movement generally; they only disrelished his getting the Council’s gift exclusively to himself. Proposing to give demonstrations in anatomy also, they preferred a petition to the town-council, asking the unclaimed bodies of persons dying in the streets, and foundlings who died off the breast; and the request was complied with, on condition of their undertaking to have a regular anatomical theatre ready before the term of Michaelmas 1697.[[134]]
Such were the beginnings of the medical school of Edinburgh.