John Duncan

Easily recognised around Edinburgh because of a long flowing beard and his yellow dog-cart drawn by two high stepping horses, John Duncan was a distinguished and distinctive Edinburgh surgeon. Unusually for a surgeon of his era he was noted as a calm, precise, and deliberate operator, characteristics which were allowed to flourish because of the advent of antiseptic surgery. As a colleague of Lister in the Royal Infirmary he was early to establish and teach Listerian antisepsis. His legacy is of a careful and successful surgeon, renowned for his consideration and patience.

John Duncan was born in Edinburgh the grandson of the founder of the firm Duncan Flockhart and Co, a well-known Edinburgh pharmaceutical firm from whom J.Y.Simpson was to buy the ingredients for his researches into anaesthesia. Duncan’s father was a successful Edinburgh doctor who, at one time, had been Surgeon to the Royal Infirmary.

After studies at the Edinburgh High School, he graduated MA with honours from Edinburgh University going on to take his MD with distinction in 1862. For the next year he acted as House Surgeon to James Syme before going on to study for two years in the medical schools of Berlin, Vienna and Paris. On the death of his father, he inherited a large general practice but devoted himself increasingly to surgery. With his appointment as Surgeon to the Royal Infirmary he became established as a skilled surgeon, “calm, precise and deliberate”. A colleague of Lister in the Royal Infirmary he was an early protagonist of Listerian antisepsis and was one of the first to have a clerk in his wards to make Gram stains and to perform cultures. The outcomes of his surgical operations at a time when abdominal surgery was in its infancy were described as outstanding.

Duncan was amongst the first to practice autotransfusion of blood, in 1886 by carefully collecting the blood spilled at leg amputation and transfusing it back via a femoral vessel.

As a teacher too, he made an impression. Tall, bearded and distinguished, he was renowned for his patience, his consideration and his courtesy to students and younger colleagues.

Besides all of this, he was a gifted sportsman, playing cricket for Scotland as a young man, an adept shot throughout his life, a curler, a golfer and an angler.

He went on, in later years, to become President of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh.