A MILITARY life, under
ordinary circumstances, seldom affords a favourable scope for the
development of medical genius. The previous education, and peculiar
habits of his profession, in some measure, unfit the medical officer for
the passive duties of a subordinate sphere, whilst the various
restraints and checks to which he becomes subject by the ungenial nature
and undefined liabilities of military control, are so many
discouragements to the acquirement of that elasticity and vigour of mind
so essential to the improvement of the mental faculties. Notwithstanding
these serious difficulties, added to those more immediately arising, in
former days, from an imperfect organization of the medical department
itself, and its undue estimation and respectibility in the service in
regard to rank and emolument, both the army and navy have given birth to
many whose genius, surmounting the ordinary disadvantages of their
station, has raised them to the first rank in medicine and surgery: not
to mention several living instances of men whose knowledge and
experience render them ornaments to medical science.
!n Dr. Colin Chisholm,
the subject of the following biographical sketch, was also one of those
who commenced his career in the service of his country. He was a native
of Invernesshire, in the northwest part of Scotland, where he was born
in the year 1755.
He received his classical
education at Inverness, and at Aberdeen, and studied medicine and
surgery at Edinburgh. At an early age he entered the army, having been
appointed surgeon to a corps of Highlanders, in the year 1775. This
corps, of which the late Dr. Robert Jackson, the eminent writer on army
diseases, was the then assistant surgeon, became afterwards the second
battalion of the seventy-first, (Highland) regiment, and, together with
the forty-second regiment, being destined for actual service in North
America, sailed from Greenock for that country, in April, 1776; the sick
of both corps being placed under Dr. Chisholm’s superintendence during
the passage. He continued to serve with the seventy-first regiment, in
different parts of America, during the whole of the revolutionary
contest. When peace was concluded, in 1783, he was placed on half-pay,
and settled as a physician at St Georges, the capital of Grenada, in the
West Indies. A few years after he had established himself here, and
principally, it is supposed, through the interest of his friend the late
Dr. John Rollo, he was appointed his successor as surgeon to the
ordnance stationed in that island. In the summer of 1794, he returned to
Britain, the first time since his settlement in I the colony, and, in
the course of that year, married Miss Eliza Cooper, an amiable young
lady of Inverness. In the autumn of 1795, he had I conferred upon him
the rank of surgeon-general to the ordnance employed upon the expedition
under the command of that lamented and gallant officer, the late General
Sir Ralph Abercromby, which sailed from Portsmouth for the West Indies,
on the 15th November of that year; but which, from heavy storms, and
consequent disasters, was unable to reach its destination till the
spring of 1796, and then only with the loss of several transports,
shipwrecked or driven back by the great inclemency of the weather, which
lasted for many successive weeks. In the year 1797 he received the
appointment of inspector-general of ordnance hospitals in the Windward
Islands. In this capacity, it became his duty to visit in person and
regulate all the artillery hospitals in the different islands; a tour
which afforded him abundant and profitable opportunities for instituting
medical and statistical observation, and inquiries in that country, on a
scale, and to an extent, seldom enjoyed by a single individual.
When the intended object
of this appointment appeared to have been fully accomplished, the board
of ordnance were highly sensible of his merits, and as a flattering
testimony of their full approbation of his services, permitted him, at
his own request, to retire from the department, granting him what was at
that time deemed a handsome allowance, namely, ten shillings per diem
for life.
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