Angus Bethune II (abt. 1575)

Born about 1575 in Scotland

Ancestors

Descendants

Died [date unknown] in Scotland

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Biography

Angus Bethune, the ‘second Dr Angus’ His father, the ‘second Dr Angus’, is known to have trained at Dunollie near Oban with Duncan Ó Conchobhair (O’Conacher or O’Connor), a member of another dynastic medical family who were physicians to the MacDougalls of Dunollie. Dr Angus is known to have written a compendium of medical treatises between 1611 and 1614, a substantial document running to 476 pages, now in the National Library of Scotland as Gaelic manuscript MSS LX ( Adv. MS. 72. 2. 10). 21 These treatises may well have formed part of his training, as a note by him on 11 January 1613 includes the phrase (in Gaelic) ‘it is Duncan [Ó Conchobhair] who gave me this book to write’. The manuscript includes translations into Gaelic of classical medical works including The Book of Prognostics from the Hippocratic Corpus, which he finished in August 1611 and Galen’s Anatomia, which he completed the following January. The treatises cover a wide range of topics, including urine examination, fevers, diseases of the eye, bullet wounds and there are a number on diet and drugs.

The Lily of Medicine By 1624 Dr Angus had become physician to Sir Ruari Mor MacLeod of Dunvegan (who died in 1626).22 According to Whyte, the second Dr Angus ‘wrote a system of physic, entitled the Lily of Medicine, which he finished at the foot of Montpelier, after he had studied physic twenty-eight years’.11 Whyte states that this was written in Irish, probably meaning in this context a form of Classical Gaelic. No such volume survives and it is more likely that this was in fact a Scots Gaelic translation of an earlier Lily of Medicine published in 1307 by the influential physician Bernard de Gordon (1270–ca.1330), who was professor of medicine at Montpelier. Some writers have suggested he was a Scot,23 but it is more likely that he was French.24 The Lily of Medicine was an extensive compendium of medical practice in which de Gordon questioned Galenic dogma. In a major change to conventional thinking he not only described clinical features of disease, but crucially related these to anatomical changes in organs, some 400 years before Morgagni, who is generally credited as the originator of this organ-based approach. In addition, the Lily gave a practical guide to treatment. Translating its 163 chapters would have been a monumental task, but provided Gaelic practitioners with arguably the most valuable text of its day. A copy of the Husabost Bethune family’s Gaelic translation of the Lily of Medicine is now in the National Library of Scotland (Lilium Medicinae MS 2076), having been donated to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1784 by Rev Donald MacQueen, minister of Kilmuir in Skye, who had inherited it from a Bethune predecessor.25,28,39 MacQueen wrote an accompanying note, stating that the book had been owned by Farquhar Beaton of Husabost ‘five generations previously’. The second Dr Angus’s father, ‘Farquhar senior’ seems the most likely candidate as that early owner of the volume. The note goes on to attest to the value which Farquhar placed on the Lilium Medicinae, saying that ‘when he trusted himself to a boat to attend to any patient in Dunvegan, he sent his servant by land for the greater security, with the Lilium Medicinae.’ Whyte seems to have been wrong in his suggestion about the authorship of the book and similarly there is no evidence to support his statement that the second Dr Angus studied at Montpelier.

Sources

• 1. www.rcpe.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Munro.pdf, page 266