Dr's Casebook: Robert Burns and the tale of Doctor Hornbook

Dr Keith Souter writes: Few poets have ever been accorded such worldwide fame as Robert Burns.

On New Year’s Eve you may well have been singing Auld Lang Syne, a song composed by him in 1788 and sung all over the world to mark the new Year.

The health of Robert Burns has fascinated people ever since his death at the early age of 37 years, partly due to dubious medical advice to bathe in the cold Solway Firth. Medical care in the eighteenth century was not regulated. Anyone could practice and advise on health and Burns composed one of his long satirical poems about this in 1785.

Death and Doctor Hornbook was written after Robert and his brother attended a talk by John Wilson, a local schoolmaster who also ran a small grocery shop. In the window to help advertise the medical products he sold he had a sign. ‘Advice given on common disorders, gratis.’

This satirical poem is about a ploughman who goes home one night from the tavern and meets and talks with Death about disease and the folk who advise about health. The devil complains that the local Doctor Hornbook is denying death of his rightful victims by his cures. Yet at the end before they part company he admits that Doctor Hornbook’s ‘crank cures’ are actually doing the job for Death for him.

Burns rather tongue in cheek used the name of his crank amateur doctor because a hornbook consisted of a sheet of paper bearing the alphabet, numbers, The Lord’s Prayer and the rules of spelling all mounted on a wooden board and protected by a thin plate of transparent horn. This was a teaching aid used in Burns’s day in Scotland. As a result ‘Hornbook’ was a popular nickname for a teacher.

In the poem he describes how doctors claimed to be able to diagnose by looking at bodily samples like earwax, urine and poo. In this he may have predicted the bowel screening programme in the UK, which is such a vital public health service available every two years for everyone aged between 60 and 74.