TheBeaton medical kindred,[2] was a Scottish kindred of professional physicians that practised medicine in the classicalGaelic tradition from theMiddle Ages to theEarly Modern Era.
The kindred appears to have emigrated fromIreland in the fourteenth century, where members seem to have originally learned their craft.[3] According to tradition, the kindred first arrived inScotland in the retinue of the Áine Ní Chatháin, daughter ofCú Maighe na nGall Ó Catháin; Áine marriedAonghus Óg Mac Domhnaill in about 1300.[4] In time the kindred came to be prominent in theScottish Highlands andIslands, although the earliest known member appears on record in theLowlands, inDumfries, during the early fourteenth century.[5] The kindred first came to be associated withIslay in the early fifteenth century, and afterwards proceeded to spread to other islands.[3] Eventually, the kindred became the largest and longest serving of the three major mediaeval medical dynasties in Gaelic Scotland.[4]
The kindred is commonly confused with the unrelatedBethune or Beaton family, historically centred inFife.[6] In fact, the medical kindred adopted the surnameBeaton in the fifteenth century.[3] By the seventeenth century, most of the seventeen or so families within the kindred had adopted the surnameBeaton, although two used the surnameBethune. Partly as a result, members of the medical kindred mistakenly came to think of themselves as descended from the Bethunes of Balfour, the principal branch of the aforesaid Bethune or Beaton family (who were ultimately ofContinental origin).[3][note 1]
Like other learned Gaelic families, members of the kindred copied and compiled manuscripts.[8] According toMartin Martin, just before the turn of the eighteenth century, a member of the kindred possessed a library of manuscripts of works ofAvicenna,Averroes,Joannes de Vigo,Bernardus Gordonus, andHippocrates.[9] The most substantial surviving example of such a work compiled by the kindred is an early sixteenth-century Gaelic translation of Gordonus'Lilium medicinae, the largest Gaelic manuscript in Scotland.[8]
There have been as many as seventy-six physicians of the kindred identified between the years 1300 and 1750.[10] Members were employed by everyScottish monarch betweenRobert I, King of Scotland (died 1329) andCharles I, King of Scotland (died 1649),[11] and patronised by numerousScottish clans such as theFrasers of Lovat,[9]MacDonald Lords of the Isles,[3] theMacLeans of Duart,[12] theMacLeods of Dunvegan,[3] and theMunros of Foulis.[13] By the eighteenth century, the family ceased to produce hereditary physicians.[3] The last died in 1714, described as "the only scholar of his race".[7]
In the television seriesOutlander (season one, episode two), characterClaire Randall, a nurse, is asked if she is "a Beaton" given that she helped another character with both a dislocated shoulder and a bullet wound. The scene is taken from the eponymous first book in the series of historical novels on which the television programs are based. In Chapter 7, Claire goes through the workspace of a fictional Davie Beaton, the now-deceased physician of Castle Leoch, providing the reader with a harrowing view of cutting-edge 18th-century medicine.