Service memories / by Sir A. D. Home ; edited by Charles H. Melville.

  • Home, Anthony Dickson, Sir.
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Service memories / by Sir A. D. Home ; edited by Charles H. Melville. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    4 SERVICE MEMORIES CHAPTER I BEQINXING LIFE (1848-1851) [The subject of the following reminiscences was bom on the 30th November, 1826, at Dunbar, and spent the early years of his life in Berwickshire, and at Selkirk. After passing through the usual medical curriculum at St, ^ Andrews, he obtained the degree of M.D. (St. Andrew’s) in 1847, and, after a year’s further study in Paris, the Member- ship of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1848. He entered the Army Medical Service as Assistant-Surgeon, being gazetted to that rank in the 3rd West India Regiment on the 17th March, 1848. Nine months later he was trans- ferred in the same rank to the 72nd Foot (now 1st Battalion Seaforth Highlanders).] The satisfaction with which I naturally regarded my establishment in a settled career in life (on 17th March, 1848) was leavened when, as a consequence, I was detailed to proceed at once to the West Indies, a station regarded as—barring the West Coast of Africa—the w'orst to which an aspirant in the Army Medical Service could be sent. To begin with, it raised the question amongst my confreres of the “ Fort Pitt Lancers ”—as the bright spirits in the garrison pleasantly called us—what I had done to merit the particular distinction, but as the bad eminence was shared by two others at the same time—three of us in the same boat—the subject of merit, by dilution, lost much of its interest. We could plead in extenuation the fact that an outburst of yellow fever in Barbadoes just then had caused some voids in the Medical Service, and that