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Aberdeen Doctors at Home and Abroad: The Narrative of a Medical School. By Ella Hill Burton Rodger. William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh and London: 1893.

If doctors in their professional capacity are necessary nuisances, we have found them capital companions in private life. Shaking of the melancholy associations of sick-chambers and death-sentences, they seem bound to be bright and cheerful in self-defence. But we have never been in better medical company than among the Aberdonian worthies who are posthumously glorified in Mrs Hill Burton Rodger's delightful 'Narrative of a Medical School.' The society is mixed in the extreme; no one can complain of lack of variety; and we are grateful to Mrs Rodger for not confining herself over-strictly to the subject immediately suggested by her title. With the shades of departed doctors, she evokes the memories, and we might say the faces and figures, of more or less learned divines in the town and the country, and of the grave professors who once filled the chairs in the twin universities of the old granite city. She paints the manners and the simple habits of many a bygone generation with many an effective touch, which gives rare vraisemblence to the portraiture; and she fills in the canvas with a background of picturesque landscape and archaeology, which excites at once our admiration and our wonder. We know Aberdeenshire well : we were born on its border, and we studied in its schools and university. We have walked it from the wild hills of Braemar to the bleak seaboard of storm-beaten Buchan, where, as Johnson said, the Lords Errol of Slains have the King of Norway for their next-door neighbour. We have fished its streams, and we have shot over its moors and forests. We owe much pleasant entertainment to many a hospitable laird, and we have gossiped over steaming toddy with many a doctor, minister, and farmer. If we say as much, it is not because we mean to be egotistical, but because we may modestly profess to being a competent judge of Mrs Rodger's marvellous accuracy. It is true that she tells us a great deal more than we have ever known or forgotten. We are mystified as to where she has found all her facts, as to whence she has drawn her Dutch-like fidelity of delineation. And if we dwell upon that absolute conviction of her truth, it is because we should credit her otherwise with a most humorous imagination. For it is a fact, that almost every one of the local celebrities she has individualised has certain oddities or eccentricities which make him quaintly attractive. Of course, as she goes groping backwards from the dim to the dark, the figures begin to fade, phantom-like, in the distance, and lose in expression and definite outline. That is inevitable, and only assures us that she never throws free reins to her fancy. But striking into the side-paths of illustrative social biography, what a panorama of personages it is that she presents!

Imprimis, there is the cowled