The surgeon James Syme was born in Edinburgh on 7 November 1799. He was educated at the Royal High School in the city, and then studied at Edinburgh University from 1815 first as a pupil of the anatomist Dr. John Barclay (1758-1826). Although Syme never actually attended a course of surgery lectures, Robert Liston (1794-1847) gave him charge of his dissecting rooms as a demonstrator in 1818, and in 1820 he became superintendent of the Edinburgh Fever Hospital. In 1822 he went to Paris, and on the retirement of Liston in 1823 Syme began delivering a regular course of anatomy lectures. In 1824 he visited medical schools in Germany, and in the following year he added a course on surgery to those already being given on surgery. In 1829, he started a private surgical hospital at Minto House and then in 1833 he was appointed to the Chair of Clinical Surgery at Edinburgh University. In 1838, Syme became Surgeon in Ordinary to the Queen in Scotland. In 1848, he accepted the Chair of Clinical Surgery at University College, London, but after some contractual misunderstandings he returned to Edinburgh the same year and resumed the Professorship there again. He was then elected President of the Medico-Chirurgical Society of Edinburgh. Syme's publications include: On the excision of diseased joints (1831), The principles of surgery (1832), On diseases of the rectum (1838), and, Observations in clinical surgery (1861). University Professor James Syme died at Millbank, near Edinburgh, on 26 June 1870, and was buried at St. John's Episcopal Church in the city's West End.
From the guide to the Material relating to Professor James Syme (1799-1870), 1828-1860, (Edinburgh University Library)
