Barclay, John

(b. Perthshire, Scotland, 10 December 1758; d. Edinburgh, Scotland, 21 August 1826)

anatomy.

John Barclay was the leading teacher of anatomy in Edinburgh at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The son of a Perthshire minister, Barclay was originally destined for the Church, and having taken his license after a good education at St. Andrews University, he acted as a preacher in the Church of Scotland before turning his attention to medicine and graduating M.D. at Edinburgh in 1796. He was thirtyeight years of age before he began to teach anatomy on his own account, after assisting John Bell in his class.

The house in High School Yards, in which he lectured, soon became too small to accommodate the students, and Barclay was obliged not only to remove to a larger classroom in Surgeonsʾ Square but also to lecture on the same subject twice a day. In 1810 the number of students attending his class had risen to 300. Barclay had no monopoly on anatomical teaching; there were other extramural classes of anatomy that prospered, especially after the retirement of the second Monro from the university chair. Barclay was, however, the first teacher of anatomy and not to engage in practice. He made a number of valuable contributions to human and comparative anatomy, and indeed it was proposed that a chair of comparative anatomy should be created for him in the university.

This proposal aroused violent discussion, and was eventually abandoned. It is commemorated by a clever cartoon in Kay’s Edinburgh Portraits, entitled “The Craft in Danger.” Barclay is shown mounted on the skeleton of an elephant, being pushed into the university gate by some of his friends. His progress is resisted by his enemies.

The Barclay Collection of Comparative Anatomy was bequeathed by him to the Royal College of Surgeons. The result of twenty-seven years of collecting, it remains a monument to his industry.

Barclay was succeeded as conservator and teacher of anatomy by Robert Knox.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Barclay’s writings include A New Anatomical Nomenclature (1803); Muscular Motions of the Human Body (1808); and The Arteries of the Human Body (1812).

II. Secondary Literature. There is no full-length biography of Barclay, but see Ballingall’s short notice (1827) and Struthersʾ memoir in his The Edinburgh Anatomical School (1867).

Douglas Guthrie

Barclay, John (1734–98), founder of the ‘Bereans’ (q.v.) or ‘Barclayites’. While he was assistant to A. Dow, the Presbyterian minister at Fettercairn in Scotland, Barclay published Rejoice Evermore (1766), in which he expounded a doctrine of immediate Divine Revelation. He was censured by the Presbytery and not appointed to succeed Dow on his death in 1772. At Edinburgh in 1773 he constituted a new Church, known as the Berean Assembly, from its zeal for the study of the Bible (cf. Acts 17: 10 f.).

Barclay, John (1582–1621), author of the extremely popular Latin romance Argenis (1621), which refers to real historical events and personages under a veil of allegory.