The life and works of Sir Alexander Crichton , F. R. S. (1763-1856): a Scottish physician to the Imperial Russian Court
The area of Newington, to the South of Edinburgh Medical School, belonged briefly in the eighteenth century to the Crichton family (1), distant descendents of the sixteenth-century soldier of fortune, James Crichton, known to history as ‘The Admirable Crichton’ (2). In the nineteenth century two members of this family (3, 4), Sir Alexander Crichton and his nephew Sir Archibald W illiam Crichton, served as physicians to the Tsars of Russia (5, 6). Sir Alexander’s grandfather, Patrick Crichton, was a saddler and ironmonger in the Canongate, Edinburgh (7), a man of some means who acquired Newington House from W illiam Tytler the Clerk to the Signet, in 1749 (8). Tw o years later he became the owner of the remainder of the Newington estate, and on his death in 1759 the property passed to the two surviving sons of his twenty-two children: William, a London alderman and High Sheriff of Middlesex, and Alexander, a coachmaker in Newington (7). Alexander had a thriving business, frequently sending carriages abroad to travelling Scotsmen, and a letter to him from the diplomatist Robert Liston survives, praising the carriage received in Madrid, adding that ‘it may put it in my power to send you more orders of the same kind’ (9). Indeed, Liston’s carriage had already attracted a further order before leaving Crichton’s Edinburgh workplace in Greenside, for as the coachmaker replied ‘The chariot sent you has been much admired here by our own countrymen and the English and I am happy to inform you that Dr Rogerson of Petersburg and a gentleman from Moscow were so much pleased with it that they have ordered carriages exactly the same’ (10).