Pitcairne, Archibald (1652–1713)

Scottish satirical poet and physician. He had strong Jacobite sympathies and ridiculed the prevalent Puritanism. The satire on Presbyterianism Babel 1692 is attributed to him; another work is the comedy The Assembly; or Scotch Reformation 1722, 1752.

Pitcairne was born in Edinburgh and studied divinity and law at the university there and then medicine in Paris. When he returned to Edinburgh he built a very extensive practice. He was a founder member of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh 1681 and the originator of the Edinburgh Medical School 1685. His medical writings were published as Dissertationes medicae 1701. He spent a year (1692) as professor of medicine at Leiden in the Netherlands, where the Dutch physician Hermann Boerhaave was among his pupils.