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Scots Who Made A Difference

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SANDEMAN, ROBERT (1718-71)
Robert Sandeman born at Perth, was a dissenter from the established Presbyterian Church. His followers were known as the Glasites, who wished to return to what they considered primitive Christianity. Before emigrating to New England in 1764, Robert stirred up quite a bit of controversy in Scotland with his Letters on Theron and Aspaslio, Addressed to the Author, published in 1757. Sandeman believed that the death of Christ alone had been sufficient to remove sin. His teachings got him deposed from the Church of Scotland, so he set up his own church at Dundee and then at Perth.

Settling in Danbury, Connecticut, where his church became the sect's principal center, Sandeman and a number of his followers set about establishing churches in many other towns, but were opposed by New England ministers. For one thing, in a most un-American way, they believed that the amassing of any wealth was unscriptural and therefore wrong. Sandeman's Church declined at the end of the century, but may have had an influence on the later founding of the Disciples of Christ.


ST. CLAIR, HENRY (1345-1400)
While Wales has its legends of Prince Madog and Ireland has St. Brendan, both are reputed to have discovered America before Columbus, Scotland has its own Henry St. Clair, who actually did arrive in the New World 90 years before the upstart Italian in the service of Spain. As one of the select few, who had made a pilgrimage to Palestine, the Scottish nobleman was known as "Henry the Holy." He held the northern island of Orkney from the King of Norway, acting more or less as an independent ruler of Orkney, Shetland and Faroe.

In 1398, Sir Henry voyaged with a party of Templars under their captain and navigator Antonio Zeno, landing at sites on Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia and what is now called Massachusetts. His visits are recorded in the tribal legends of the Micmacs, some of whom still survive in New England.

Sir Henry's exploits are celebrated by the Prince Henry Sinclair Society of North America, who will conduct numerous events in honor of the 600th anniversary of his voyage to the New World. (The society's home page is www.mids.org/sinclair/600).


SCOTT, ALEXANDER (1525-85)
It is not known where Alexander Scott, one of the last of the 16th century makaris (plural of makar, a poet) was born. His 35 extant poems show him to be a genuine minor lyric poet, especially a writer of polished love lyrics. From them, found in the Bannatyne Manuscript (1568), we can get some kind of picture of early Reformation Scotland. With his death came the end of the old Scottish metrical forms.


SCOTT, SIR WALTER (1771-1832)
Edinburgh-born Walter Scott can be said to have invented the historical novel. He has remained one of the most popular novelists of all time, though his lengthy narratives have a bit of a problem keeping the interest of today's fast-moving generation fed on a diet of television "sound-bites." Trained as a lawyer and sheriff of Selkirk in 1799, Scott was a principal clerk of session in 1896, but had already embarked upon his literary career by translating from the German.

In 1802, Scott published his collection of ballads, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, followed by his own compositions in the enormously popular The Lay of the Last Minstrel in 1805. Next came Marmion (1808), The Lady of the Lake (1810) and other poems including The Lord of the Isles (1815). It was time to turn to the novel. A prolific output of some of the world's best novels then ensured from Scott, at first known only by a pseudonym and referred to as "The Great Unknown."

Waverley was completed in 1814. It was followed by Guy Mannering (1815), The Antiquary and Old Mortality (1816), Rob Roy and The Heart of Midlothian (1818), The Bride of Lammermoor and A Legend of Montrose (1819), Ivanhoe, The Monastery and The Abbot (1820), Kenilworth (1821), The Pirate and The Fortunes of Nigel (1822), Peveril of the Peak and Quentin Durward (1823), Redgauntlet (1824), The Talisman (1825), Woodstock (1826), The Fair Maid of Perth (1828), Anne of Geierstein (1829), Count Robert of Paris and Castle Dangerous (1831).

The novels were being turned out at great speed to pay off his enormous debts, especially those with the running of his mansion at Abbotsford. As if all this were not enough, Scott also contributed many serious prose works valuable as scholarship. He edited the Works of Dryden (1810) and The Works of Swift (in 19 vols. 1814) as well as the Letters of Sir Ralph Sadler (1809) and the Somers Tracts (1809-15 in 13 volumes). In 1823, he founded the Bannatyne Club to promote interest in historical scholarship, prime examples of which were his Life of Napoleon (1827); Tales of a Grandfather (1828-30), essentially a child's history of Scotland; and a History of Scotland (for Lardner's Cyclopedia). While he was doing all this, he continued to write articles for the Quarterly Review and the Encyclopedia Britannica.

We remember Scott as novelist, biographer, ballad collector, editor, poet, critic and historian. In all his novels, Scott gave us a romantic, nationalistic Scotland. Such was his fame, that when George IV came to Scotland, the author stage-managed the visit, the King himself being dressed in the once-forbidden Highland tartan. Scott's life was memorialized in a work by his son-in-law John Gibson Lockhart's the Life of Scott (in 7 vols.).


SELKIRK, THOMAS DOUGLAS, 5th Earl (1771-1820)
The Canadian City of Winnipeg, in Manitoba, owes its founding to Thomas Douglas Selkirk, from St. Mary's Isle, Kirkcudbrightshire, who set up the first Scottish settlement on Prince Edward Island. It seemed to Selkirk that emigration from the economically depressed Highlands to Canada would help alleviate some of the problems of the poor Scottish farmers and peasants.

From the Hudson's Bay Company, which he controlled in 1810, Selkirk obtained a vast land grant in the Red River Valley and encouraged many of his fellow countrymen to settle there, near the pioneer French settlement of Ft. Rouge. Though progress in the colony was initially hindered by rivalry with the Northwest Fur Company, Selkirk's valley settlement grew rapidly in the late 19th century to become the city of Winnipeg, capital of Manitoba.


SELKIRK, ALEXANDER (1676-1721)
When shoemaker's son Alexander Selkirk, born in Largo, Fife, ran away to sea in 1695, little did he know that his subsequent adventures would inspire one of the most well known and beloved novels in the history of English literature. Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe was published in 1719; two years before the enterprising Scot died as master's mate on a British ship.

After joining a pirate band, Selkirk's obvious seamanship soon won him the position of master of a galley, but a quarrel with his captain found him put ashore (at his own request) on Mas a Tierra Island in the Juan Fernandez Group, about 400 miles west of Valparaiso, Chile. He was not discovered for five years, when an English ship picked him up and took him back to England, where they arrived in 1711. One year later, a description of his lonely life on the island was published in Cruising Voyagre Round the World. It was also written up by essayist Richard Steele in The Englishman in late 1713. But it was Defoe who gave the world the imaginative story concocted out of Selkirks' lonely sojourn on the island.


SHAW, RICHARD NORMAN (1831-1912)
Edinburgh-born Richard Shaw became a very important architect and urban designer in Britain in the latter part of the 19th century. He was one of the founders of the English Domestic Revival Movement that particularly showed an interest in 17th century English Palladian architecture. Shaw's influence reached North America, where it was responsible for the domestic designs known as the American Shingle style. His planning of the garden suburb at Bedford Park, London was enormously influence on the future development of suburban planning in Britain and elsewhere.


SHEARER, MOIRA (b. 1926)
One of the most well known ballerinas and actresses of the 1940's and 50's was Moira Shearer, the stage name of Moira Shearer King, born in Dunfermline, Fife and best-remembered for her outstanding role in the 1948 film The Red Shoes. After a period of training with the Sadler's Wells School in London, Moira became the company's leading ballerina, starring in such classics as Sleeping Beauty, Coppelia, Swan Lake and Giselle.

After creating important roles in many of Frederick Ashton's ballets, including Cinderella in 1948, Miss Shearer began a new career as a film actress, beginning with The Red Shoes, but also including Tales of Horrmann (1951); The Man Who loved Redheads (1955) and Black Tights (1962). Her ballet training was used most effectively when she played Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream at the 1954 Edinburgh International Festival of Music and Drama. However, in the original London and Bristol Old Vic theatres she played a non-dancing, more dramatically challenging part as the lead in Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara.


SHORT, JAMES (1710-68)
Yet another illustrious son of Edinburgh in the 18th century, James Short is remembered as the one who produced the first truly parabolic and elliptic mirrors for reflecting telescopes. Prior to the work of this optician and instrument maker, telescopes had suffered too much distortion to be truly effective. After hearing a series of lectures by the mathematician Colin MacLaurin, Short turned his interests from the ministry to mathematics and optics. He devised advanced techniques for grinding telescopic mirrors. Short's reflecting telescopes were among the finest made at the time. Alas, extremely secretive about his work, he destroyed his workshop tools shortly before his death.


SIMPSON, ARCHIBALD (1790-1847)
Aberdeen-born Archibald Simpson became the leading architect during his native city's rapid expansion between 1800 and 1840. From 1813 to 1843, he designed many of the principal public buildings in Aberdeen, "the Granite City." Some of his buildings are the Athenaeum, the Clydesdale Bank, St. Andrew's Cathedral and the Triple Kirks, with perhaps his finest achievement in Elgin, St. Giles. Simpson also contributed to civic architecture with his famed Bon Accord Square and Crescent.


SIMPSON, SIR JAMES YOUNG (1811-70)
From Bathgate in Linlithgowshire (now West Lothian) professor of obstetrics at Edinburgh University, James Simpson is to be remembered as one of the first to regularly use anesthesia in childbirth. Learning of the use of ether in surgery in 1846, he tried it the following year. He substituted chloroform for ether during the same year and published his soon-to-become classic, Account of a new Anaesthetic Agent.

Though severely hampered by the clergy and leading obstetricians in his pioneering work in the use of chloroform for relief of labor pains, both professions considering pain part and parcel of the birthing process, (and no doubt, divinely ordained), Simpson persisted in his glorious work. In 1847 he was appointed one of Queen Victoria's physicians for Scotland. He introduced wire sutures and acupressure to arrest hemorrhage. He also developed the long obstetrics forceps that bear his name and contributed to much-needed improvements in hospital administration.

Simpson also wrote on medical history, including treatises on then much misunderstood disease of leprosy in Scotland as well as on fetal pathology and hermaphroditism. His long interest in archaeology is shown in his Archaeological Essays (1873).


SKINNER, JAMES SCOTT (1843-1927)
One of the most popular Scottish musical groups today is "Silly Wizard," who carry on a long tradition of fiddle music that was in danger of dying out in the 19th century if not for the inspired work of James Scott Skinner, the self-styled "Strathspey King." Skinner, from Deeside, had received classical violin training as a youth. As a mature artist he travelled throughout the British Isles and the US, exhibiting his mastery of Scottish fiddle techniques and enlarging the repertory by over 600 items. Many of these have become extremely popular with today's generation of Scottish fiddlers, without whom no self-respecting Scottish folk band would dare take the stage.


SMELLIE, WILLIAM (1697-1763)
James Simpson was not the only Scots obstetrician who put his art and craft on a firm scientific basis, for William Smellie had preceeded him. Lanark-born Smellie was the first in his country (and possibly the world) to teach obstetrics and midwifery on a scientific basis. When he allowed medical students to attend the delivery of poor women (who were delivered free of charge), a trend was established that led to the use of medically trained men in childbirth, for many centuries a practice that had been enjoyed solely by midwives, often sorely untrained.

Smellie is especially known for his discovery and description of "the mechanism of labour," or how the infant's head adapts to changes in the pelvic canal during birth. He also invented an obstetric forcep. His writings include A Sett of Anatomical Tables (1754) and Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Midwifery (3 vols. 1752-64).


SMELLIE, WILLIAM (1740-95)
Natural historian William Smellie, from Edinburgh, helped found the Newtonian Society in 1760 and the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1780. As a writer and translator of various works in natural sciences as well as a master printer, it was only natural and perhaps inevitable that he should be asked (by Edinburgh engraver Andrew Bell) to compile the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica which appeared during the years 1768-71.

The Encyclopedia, or a Dictionary of Arts and Sciences Compiled Upon a New Plan was published by Smellie and two of his friends who called themselves "A Society of Gentlemen in Scotland." It was a three-volume, 2,659-page work that sold for a year's working man's wages. In it California is described as "a large country of the West Indies" and woman is defined as "the female of man." Nevertheless, a start had been made on what was to become one of the most informative and influential series of books ever published. At the same time, the French Encylopedie, was being completed in Paris by Denis Diderot (its 280th and final volume was published in 1772).


SMIBERT, JOHN (1688-1751)
The tradition of portrait painting in colonial Boston was established mainly through the influence of Edinburgh-born John Smibert, who emigrated in 1728 to Rhode Island after working as a house painter in Edinburgh and training as a portrait artist in Italy. Though his initial plans to establish a college for native Americans in the Bermudas failed, Smibert moved to Boston, where his services were soon in great demand and where his work remains an important record of early, influential Bostonians.

Smibert's portraits were produced in conjunction with his other paintings, copies of the "old masters" and unique casts of ancient sculpture. In 1742, he drew the plans for Faneuil Hall, Boston, known as one of the cradles of Liberty. His best known work is "Bishop Berkeley, Family and Friends" (1729). Perhaps Smibert's greatest legacy, however, comes in the influence he had on later American artists, including Copley, Feke, Trumbull and Allston.


SMITH, ADAM (1723-90)
One of the most influential social philosophers and political economists in all history is Adam Smith, from Kirkcaldy, Fife, whose master work An Inquiry into the nature of causes of the Wealth of Nations was first published in 1776 but has continued its appeal (and enormous influence) ever since.

First studying mathematics, natural philosophy and moral philosophy at Glasgow University, Smith entered Balliol College, Oxford in 1740. When he returned to Edinburgh to lecture, he met philosopher and skeptic David Hume as well as other leading intellectuals and trendsetters. In 1751, he became Chair of Logic at Glasgow and later of Moral Philosophy.

On a visit to Paris in 1764-5, Smith became acquainted with the ideas of many of the leading French thinkers of the day and was able to experience first-hand the closely controlled economy of France. His Wealth of Nations consequently reflected much of the ideas he had so readily absorbed in that country. It can be said to have marked the transition from a more-or-less late medieval to a modern economy. Smith was able to grasp intuitively what it was that constituted the real wealth of a nation; he advocated the then-revolutionary idea of free trade as a means of increasing that wealth.

The publication of Smith's work greatly influenced the thinking and policies of British Prime Minister William Pitt. For Smith, it was the "invisible hand" of competition that acted as the guiding light for en economic system based on individual self-interests. The idea of free trade dominated British economic policy right up until the 20th century when Smith's ideas were abandoned in favor of the old controls and restrictions that he had rightly condemned as being counter productive to the acquisition of a country's wealth.


SMITH, SIR GEORGE ADAM (1856-1942)
Scottish preacher and Semitic scholar George Adam Smith was born in Balerno, Midlothian. Though he was famous in theological circles for his sound Biblical scholarship, it may have been in another field that his influence became more pronounced. In World War l, British General Sir Edmund Allenby's victorious Palestine campaign against the armies and allies of Turkey made much use of Smith's book The Historical Geography of the Holy Land (1894, rev, 1931).

Allenby's campaign led to the annexation of Palestine as a British Protectorate and a precursor of the state of Israel, which came into being at the end of the World War II when British forces once again engaged in the area. The book may also have influenced opinions of leading British politicians who supported the Balfour Declaration of 1917 that gave birth to the modern state of Israel.


SMITH, WILLIAM ROBERTSON (1846-94)
Another Scot, another Smith and another leading intellectual was William R. Smith, from Keig, Aberdeenshire. In addition to his fame as a Biblical scholar, Smith earns his place as an encyclopedist, student of comparative religion and social anthropology and Semitic specialist. He taught oriental languages and Old Testament exegesis at the Free Church College of Aberdeen, but his articles in the ninth edition of Encyclopedia Britannica brought him fame (and condemnation from the Free Church authorities). His articles eventually led to his dismissal from the College.

Smith's erudition led to his appointment as joint editor of the Britannica in 1880 and academic positions at Cambridge University from 1883. He stayed at Britannica until the completion of the prestigious ninth edition in 1888. His 1885 publication Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia was an important landmark in the study of comparative religion, but his Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (1889) is considered his most original work.

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