Blair, Patrick

Dates	c.1720-1728
Location	Boston
Vocation	Physician; pastor
Place of Birth	Lethendy, Perthshire
Marriage	Elizabeth Whyte
Issue	John, Henry, Isobell (d.1745), Elizabeth
Place of birth		Source	National Records of Scotland, St Andrews Commissary Court, CC20/4/2; Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

National Records: Mentioned in the will of his daughter, Isobell. Originally a physician in Dundee, but later a pastor serving at Coupar Angus and Boston, Lincolnshire.

Son of George and Euphame. Blair was apprenticed to a surgeon-apothecary in the 1680s, where he later set up a practice. He moved to Flanders between 1664-7 but his whereabouts are unknown until c.1700 when he appears in Dundee. Blair was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1712 and received his MD from King’s College Aberdeen. He lived in Coupar Angus until travelling to London 1713. Blair came from a Jacobite family and was acquainted with the Jacobite physician Archibald Pitcairne and the Earl of Mar. He joined Lord Nairn’s battalion in 1715 as a surgeon and was taken prisoner at Preston. He was then taken to London, tried at Newgate where he pleaded guilty on 31 March 1716 and sentenced to death. Blair secured a pardon but had difficulty in re-establishing his practice. He moved to Boston, Lincolnshire c.1720 where he practiced medicine and continued botanical studies. Blair's Botanick Essays was published in the same year. Blair's interest in botany was both medical and scientific; he was interested in pharmaceutical uses of plants but also investigated their intrinsic properties. In 1723 Blair published the first volume of Pharmaco-botanologia, an encyclopaedic account of the plants listed in the London pharmacopoeia; it was completed until the letter H, as Blair died January 1728.