David Fyfe, the son of a merchant, was apprenticed to John Baillie.
A Town Council minute of September 1696 states that Hugh Paterson and Thomas Henderson, surgeon apothecaries, declared that they had ‘taken trial and examination of David Fyfe, surgeon burgess, in the art of Pharmacy and found him sufficiently qualified therein’. The Council therefore admitted and received him ‘apothecary and member of the Fraternity of apothecaries and surgeon-apothecaries’.
Fyfe, in his turn, took on eight apprentices and 13 servants; five servants became apprentices but only one a master surgeon.
David Fyfe was Treasurer from 1702 to 1706 and was the first to be given this title instead of Boxmaster.
He demonstrated ‘the brain and its membranes’ and gave a discourse on ‘the animal spirits’ in the anatomy demonstration of 1702.
Fyfe must have attended Lady Roseburn because it is recorded in the Minutes that her relatives owed him £281 for ‘drugs, medicaments and cerecloths, powders and others to her corps and coffin’.
He gave a gift to the Library of ‘an Italian padlock for women’, the present whereabouts of which is not known.
Fyfe lived in a house on the east side of Marlin's Wynd, near where the Tron Kirk stands today. The Fyfe family also seem to have owned property in Bailie Fyfe's Close on the north side of the High Street over which there was some dispute. In 1744 the executors of the late Patrick, only son of the late David Fyfe, took legal action against the son of the late Bailie, Gilbert Fyfe, over ownership of the house.
