《11乡土式微Ill_Fares_the_Land》.pdf

Small farms Ill Fares the Land by W.W. Yellowlees, MC, FRCGP (Dr. Walter Yellowlees) General Practitioner, Aberfeldy, Perthshire The James MacKenzie Lecture, 1978 Journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners, 1979, 29, pp. 7-21. I am grateful for the great honour the College has done me in inviting me to give this lecture. It is an honour which I neither dreamed of having, nor, knowing my own shortcomings, thought I deserved. I can, however, make one geographical claim to be a Mackenzie lecturer. Mackenzies mother, Jean Campbell Menzies, is said to have come from a family which farmed land near the village of Amulree not far from Aberfeldy: and my brother Daves farm of Muirhall, near Scone, on the outskirts of Perth, shares a common boundary with Pictstonhill Farm where Mackenzie was born and brought up. Parents and family One August day, when the fields were yellow with ripening corn, in search of inspiration for this lecture I crossed the fence to look on Mackenzies birthplace. The old stone cottage is now much dwarfed by new buildings and altered by the needs of modern agriculture. Like Professor Alex Mair, whose splendid biography of James Mackenzie (Mair, 1973) is such a boon to Mackenzie lecturers, I marvelled at the thought of the family of four boys and three girls reared in this small cottage with its hundred acres of land. As I looked on those fields and hills, I thought of men like James Mackenzie, nurtured in those Victorian days amid the unceasing toll of wresting a living from the land. The Scottish presbyterian tradition of family worship, Bible study, and strict observance of the Sabbath, was ingrained in their young lives. However much the strictness of these observances in childhood may have led Mackenzie and others of his genera