Case Histories/Notes et dossiers de recherche: The Library of Thomas Kincaid, a Seventeenth-Century Scottish Surgeon

In 1709 the library of the Incorporation of Surgeons of Edinburgh (now The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh) received a donation of approximately 230 books. They had belonged to Thomas Kincaid, a master surgeon who lived and worked in Edinburgh in the second half of the seventeenth century. Little is known about Kincaid; however, he was not unimportant in both burgh and Incorporation affairs in the 1640s and 1650s. Reconstructing the collection to allow us to peer along Kincaid’s bookshelves, therefore, will shed some light on this otherwise obscure surgeon.