John Alexander MacWilliam, 1857 - 1937

John Alexander MacWilliam, the son of a farmer, was born on 31 July 1857, in the fertile parish of Kiltarlity, on the banks of the Beauly just within the northern fringe of Inverness-shire. In 1886, when twenty-nine years of age, he was appointed to the Chair of Physiology— then known as the “Institutes of Medicine” — in the University of Aberdeen. He occupied this Chair for forty-one years, retiring in 1927, but after his retirement continued to live in his home at Cults on the Dee. He died on 13 January, 1937, while on a visit to Edinburgh. He was in his eightieth year. He entered Aberdeen University as a student of arts in 1874, being then seventeen years of age, but after two years at arts moved to medicine* graduating M.B., C.M. in the spring of 1880, with “Highest Honours It is a matter characteristic of the subject of this notice that we do not know the steps which led him to devote his life to physiology; he was ever interested in the doings of those round him, but as regards himself totally and irremediably impersonal. We know that he worked with Ludwig in Leipzig and with Kronecker in Berne. We know that in 1882 he became Demonstrator in Physiology under Schafer, but apparently before then held some house appointments at hospitals in London. The research to which he applied himself was inspired by the work that was being done on the heart by Gaskell at Cambridge rather than by anything that was being done then at University College.