David Macbeth Moir

1798 - 1851

Author and Physician. Moir was born and lived in Musselburgh, where he attended the grammar-school and later practised medicine. He undertook his medical training at the University of Edinburgh, graduating in 1816. He began writing poetry while only fourteen, contributing to Constable's Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany from 1817 and later Blackwood's Magazine, where he wrote under the pseudonym Delta. In 1841 he produced a memoir of John Galt (1779 - 1840) to accompany an edition of Galt's Annals of the Parish and the Ayrshire Legatees. Moir also published poetry, the humorous Life of Mansie Wauch, Tailor in Dalkeith (1828) and an Ancient History of Medicine (1831).

Having suffered a series of ailments, Moir travelled to Dumfries in an attempt to rest and recover, but there he died. His public funeral attracted a large number of mourners and his ashes are buried in Inveresk churchyard. He is remembered by a great obelisk at the western end of Musselburgh High Street.

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