The significance of the Regius Chair of Military Surgery that existed in the University of Edinburgh from 1806–55 is discussed in detail for the first time in this book. The first holder, John Thomson, also held the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh's Chair of Surgery from 1804. This Regius Chair was the only one of its type in Britain for almost 50 years, and was established during the Peninsular War. After the second holder, Sir George Ballingall, died in 1855, the Government withdrew its funding support. This Chair introduced numerous Edinburgh medical students to Military Surgery, and many who attended subsequently entered the Medical Service of either the Army, Navy or East India Company. Large numbers of medical officers in the Public service also attended. These courses were popular, and the topics covered were not discussed elsewhere in the Edinburgh medical curriculum.

This is the first comprehensive study of the life and work of Andrew Fernando Holmes, famous for his work on congenital heart disease. Physician, surgeon, natural historian, educator, Protestant evangelical. Andrew Fernando Holmes’s name is synonymous with the McGill medical faculty and with the discovery of a congenital heart malformation known as the "Holmes heart." Born in captivity at Cadiz, Spain, Holmes immigrated to Lower Canada in the first decade of the nineteenth century. He arrived in a province that was experiencing profound social, economic, and cultural change as the result of a long process of integration into the British Atlantic world. A transatlantic perspective, therefore, undergirds this biography, from an exploration of how Holmes’s family members were participants in an Atlantic world of trade and consumption, to explaining how his educational experiences at Edinburgh and Paris informed his approach to the practice of medicine, medical education, and medical politics.

First multi-year cumulation covers six years: 1965-70.