Hugh Broun (?1645-?1705), FRCSEd
ED.CS.2010.41
Broun, Hugh (?1645-?1705). FRCSEd 1665. Portrait in oil in oval gilt frame. circa 1700. Artist: Medina, John Baptiste de (1659-1710).
Prior to 1647 the Incorporation of Surgeons had no regular meeting place, its business meetings and anatomy lessons being held usually in the house of the Deacon. Between then and 1669 the Surgeons occupied three different premises but the building at Curryhill (or High School) Yards which they were occupying in 1669 does not seem to have been very satisfactory because, at a meeting in May, the deacon enquired ‘what they would do anent the building of their Convening House’. The members present who included Hugh Broun agreed to give or to lend one hundred pounds each. Those who gave the money were to have their names ‘put up in the house’. Those who lent it were not to have their names displayed but were to be repaid, without interest, when the ‘Calling’ could conveniently repay it. ‘The Deaken and members (are) to report to the calling at the nixt meating quho ar disasenteris and impeders of this work, and their names (are) to be set doune in the buik to the effect they may be knowen’.
Hugh Broun was appointed as Chirurgeon Apothecary to King James VII in 1688.
Broun was a Roman Catholic and, in 1695, his attendance at a Roman Catholic service earned him the serious disapproval of the authorities. ‘This day, being Sunday, the Catholics of Edinburgh were so bold as to hold a meeting for worship in the Canongate’. As a consequence, ‘James Brown, son to Hugh Brown, chirurgeon, and the said Hugh, his father’, with others, were ordered to give bond to an assurance ‘of their doing nothing offensive to the Government in future’ or ‘else to be kept in prison’. In the same year his son, James, was examined before Parliament in the case of the Earl of Melfort, a Jacobite exile. Before he gave evidence James craved ‘remission for his being and corresponding in France’ after 1st August 1693, contrary to an Act of Parliament.
His name and that of his son appear on a list of ‘Papists and children under papists within the bounds of the Presbytery of Edinburgh’ in 1704, the son as "apostate Papist". Two of his daughters married surgeons
18th century
