Skip to main content

Author: Moir, David Macbeth

Biography:

Moir, David Macbeth (1798-1851: ODNB)

Physician and essay writer, he was born in Musselburgh, Midlothian, to Robert Moir and Elizabeth (Macbeth) Moir, and educated at the Musselburgh grammar school before being apprenticed to a local doctor at the age of thirteen. During the four years of his apprenticeship he also studied at the University of Edinburgh, receiving his medical diploma in 1816 and joining a practice in Musselburgh in 1817. He began submitting essays to periodicals from an early age and became a contributor to the Scot’s Magazine, Archibald Constable’s Edinburgh Magazine, the Edinburgh Literary Gazette, the Journal of Agriculture, Blackwood’s Magazine, and Fraser’s Magazine. He was close friends with a number of Scottish writers—including William Maginn, John Wilson (q.v.), and John Galt (q.v.)—and with William Blackwood. (He was Blackwood’s physician and attended his deathbed in 1834.) Using the pseudonym “Delta,” Moir contributed hundreds of essays and tales to Blackwood’s Magazine. On Blackwood’s request, he edited for publication Galt’s 1826 novel The Last of the Lairds—work that included writing several additional chapters at a time when Galt had left for Canada. The tales that make up Moir’s The Life of Mansie Wauch (1828) were originally published in Blackwood’s Magazine; Moir was induced to issue them in a volume after they began being pirated in London. He also wrote on medicine: his Outlines of the Ancient History of Medicine appeared in 1832, followed by several pamphlets on cholera after his experiences of treating the disease during the European pandemic. In 1829 he married Catherine Elizabeth Bell with whom he had eleven children (three died in infancy). For seven years before his death (from complications following a fall from his horse) he represented the Annan burgh in the Church of Scotland’s annual assembly. He died at Dumfries. (ODNB 13 Apr 2020; www.british-fiction.cf.ac.uk 13 Apr 2020)

 

Other Names:

  • D. M. Moir
 

Books written (3):

Edinburgh: John Robertson, 1816
Edinburgh/ London: William Blackwood/ T. Cadell, 1825
Glasgow: W. R. McPhun, [1835]