Robert Sibbald

Sir Robert Sibbald (1641 to 1722) was a Scottish physician and antiquary, born in Edinburgh and educated at the Royal High School and the universities of Edinburgh, Leiden and Paris. He took his doctor's degree at the University of Angers in 1662 and soon afterwards settled as a physician in Edinburgh. In 1667, with Sir Andrew Balfour, he started the botanical garden in Edinburgh, and he took a leading part in founding the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, of which he was elected president in 1684. From 1682 he gathered material for a projected geographical description or atlas of Scotland, drawing on parish ministers and gentry; the work was never published, but many manuscripts on the geography, natural history and antiquities of Scotland survive. He was appointed the first professor of medicine at the University of Edinburgh in 1685, and was knighted, named Physician to the King and made Geographer Royal in 1682. The plant genus Sibbaldia is named after him.