John Grieve's correspondence with Joseph Black and some contemporaneous Russo-Scottish medical intercommunication.

On 28 January 1783, Joseph Black, professor of medicine and chemistry at Edinburgh Univeristy, and William Robertson, its principal, were elected honorary foreign members of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In May of that year, John Grieve, a Scottish doctor returning to Britain from service with the Russian army, wrote from Riga, as "a scholar to his old master", to inform Black of arrangements for delivering the Academy's diploma, which he conveyed as far as London.' To understand the context of their subsequent correspondence and the development of Russo-Scottish medical intercommunication, a brief outline of relevant contacts between the two countries is necessary. In July 1762, a revolution occurred in Russia: Peter III, the feeble-minded tsar, was murdered at the instigation of his wife Catherine, who succeeded to the throne. Scottish doctors, through introductions and family connexions, had made their presence strongly felt in Russian medical life. One of them, James Mounsey, the late tsar's senior physician and director of the country's entire medical services, prudently chose to retire to Scotland at this juncture, on health grounds. Evidently, the situation had soon stabilized, for in September 1766, John Rogerson, whose mother was Mounsey's half-sister, arrived in Russia recommended by Mounsey. Licensed to practise, Rogerson was appointed court physician in 1769. In the next year, John Robison, relinquishing his lectureship in chemistry at Glasgow University, accompanied Admiral Sir Charles Knowles to Russia, to take up a post at the Imperial Sea Cadet Corps of Nobles-possibly escorted by another Scottish doctor, Matthew Guthrie, who was returning to St Petersburg with an MD diploma from St Andrews University. Guthrie was to play an important part in Scottish-Russian medical relations. There was certainly a close friendship, cemented by family ties, between him and Robison, who also wrote that Rogerson's "Society and freindship Lsic] were the chief comforts of my Life while I was in Russia".2