According to the council minutes in November 1887 Dr Wyllie had ‘asked the Council to take some steps procuring a bust of the late Dr. Haldane’, and therefore the treasurer was instructed to ‘ascertain informally the cost of one understood to be in preparation’. Later that month the treasurer reported having met Charles McBride who was then making a bust of Haldane. McBride had told the treasurer that his fee ‘was from one hundred to one hundred and twenty guineas’. The College decided to request a cast of the bust in plaster so ‘the Fellows of the College might have an opportunity of judging its merits’ before deciding whether or not to purchase a marble bust. In February the following year the council minutes note that the fellows had now seen the requested plaster bust and the following month they decided to purchase the bust, which depicts Haldane in contemporary dress, in marble ‘at a cost of one hundred guineas’.
Daniel Rutherford Haldane (1824 – 1887)
Haldane graduated with an M.D. from the University of Edinburgh in 1848 and worked as resident physician at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary before spending time studying in Vienna and Paris. When he returned to Edinburgh Haldane also returned to working in the infirmary as well as lecturing in the Edinburgh medical school at Surgeons’ Hall on topics including medical jurisprudence and clinical medicine. Haldane was secretary and then president of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, and also represented the college on the General Medical Council.
His obituary in the British Medical Journal (April 16 1887) stated that he was ‘one of the prominent Fellows of the College of Physicians, Edinburgh, taking for many years a keen interest in everything that could advance the interests and scientific status of that institution; and his unwearied labours on its behalf were suitably acknowledged by his having been twice elected President of the College and presented with a service of plate’.