| Description | The Club was formed at a meeting of five doctors in the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. Membership was limited to medical graduates from the years 1880-1889, hence the name. The Presidency was to be held in rotation according to seniority, or alphabetically for graduates from the same year, and the President's annual oration was to be on a non-medical topic. Among the founders of the Club were Diarmid Noel Paton, lecturer in the Institutes of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, and Norman Walker, Assistant Physician at the Royal Infirmary. Winter dinners were characterised by humorous menus and the summer meetings by a golf tournament. From the 1930s, as members grew older, the Club became less vigorous. In 1939 meetings were suspended for the war and were never resumed.
[Source: 'Scottish Medical Societies' by Jacqueline Jenkinson]
Contents: Records of the meetings of the Octogenarian Club, 1895-1939; the Book of the Chronicles of the Club of the Octogenarians, 1901; Octogenarian Club Song Book, 1895-1898; financial Records of the Octogenarian Club, 1895-1938; photographs of the Octogenarian Club, 1895-1908 |