Honour for David Livingstone’s descendent - Bearsden doctor Neil Wilson

dr livingstones great grandson neil wilson

Published on 24/02/2013 10:40

A MOVING tribute to Scottish medical missionary and explorer, David Livingstone, was paid at a health board meeting last week by his great, great grandson who is also a Glasgow surgeon.

Mr Neil Wilson from Bearsden commemorated the bicentenary of the great explorer’s birth by presenting the Glasgow health board boss, Andrew Robertson, with a historic gavel carved from the wood of the tree where Livingstone’s heart was buried following his death in Zambia in 1873.

The gavel has a long standing connection with the health service in Glasgow as it was used by the NHS Executive Council for the City of Glasgow following the creation of the NHS from 1948 through to 1974.

Since then the gavel has remained in safe keeping within the NHS archives.

Presenting the gavel, Mr Wilson, a paediatric orthopaedic surgeon at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children at Yorkhill, said: “To have such a tangible link is a great reminder that the events of the past live on into the present.”

Receiving the gavel on behalf of the health board, Mr Robertson, said: “I am absolutely delighted to receive this wonderful historical artefact.

“Following David Livingstone’s death Florence Nightingale described him as ‘the greatest man of the age’ and it is indeed an honour to receive this gavel which will be put on display for our visitors to see.

“Given Livingstone’s strong links to medicine in Glasgow it seems to me that it is fitting for us to be responsible for the safekeeping of this most extraordinary of artefacts.”

Health board archivist, Alistair Tough said that with the gavel there was also a certificate of authenticity from another famous historical figure, Robert Young, who was the British officer

responsible for suppressing the slave trade in North Eastern Zambia following Livingstone’s death.

News

Looking for...

Featured advertisers

Jobs

Search for a job

Motors

Search for a car

Make Model Price from Price to

Property

Search for a house

Buy Rent

Bedrooms Price from Price from Price to Price to

What is a Cookie?
What is a Flash Cookie?
Can I opt out of receiving Cookies?
About our Cookies

Cookies are small data files which are sent to your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc) from a website you visit. They are stored on your electronic device.
This is a type of cookie which is collected by Adobe Flash media player (it is also called a Local Shared Object) - a piece of software you may already have on your electronic device to help you watch online videos and listen to podcasts.
Yes there are a number of options available, you can set your browser either to reject all cookies, to allow only "trusted" sites to set them, or to only accept them from the site you are currently on.

However, please note - if you block/delete all cookies, some features of our websites, such as remembering your login details, or the site branding for your local newspaper may not function as a result.
The types of cookies we, our ad network and technology partners use are listed below:
- Revenue Science ►
  
  A tool used by some of our advertisers to target adverts to you based on pages you have visited in the past. To opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Google Ads ►
  
  Our sites contain advertising from Google; these use cookies to ensure you get adverts relevant to you. You can tailor the type of ads you receive by visiting here or to opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Webtrends / Google Analytics ►
  
  This is used to help us identify unique visitors to our websites. This data is anonymous and we cannot use this to uniquely identify individuals and their usage of the sites.
- Dart for Publishers ►
  
  This comes from our ad serving technology and is used to track how many times you have seen a particular ad on our sites, so that you don't just see one advert but an even spread. This information is not used by us for any other type of audience recording or monitoring.
- ComScore ►
  
  ComScore monitor and externally verify our site traffic data for use within the advertising industry. Any data collected is anonymous statistical data and cannot be traced back to an individual.
- Local Targeting ►
  
  Our Classified websites (Photos, Motors, Jobs and Property Today) use cookies to ensure you get the correct local newspaper branding and content when you visit them. These cookies store no personally identifiable information.
- Grapeshot ►
  
  We use Grapeshot as a contextual targeting technology, allowing us to create custom groups of stories outside out of our usual site navigation. Grapeshot stores the categories of story you have been exposed to. Their privacy policy and opt out option can be accessed here.
- Subscriptions Online ►
  
  Our partner for Newspaper subscriptions online stores data from the forms you complete in these to increase the usability of the site and enhance user experience.
- Add This ►
  
  Add This provides the social networking widget found in many of our pages. This widget gives you the tools to bookmark our websites, blog, share, tweet and email our content to a friend.
- 3rd Party Cookies ►
  
  We use Advertising agencies to provide us with some of the advertising on our websites. These include (but are not limited to) Specific Media, The Rubicon Project, AdJug, AdConion, Context Web. Please click on the provider name to visit their opt-out page.

Honour for David Livingstone’s descendent - Bearsden doctor Neil Wilson

Top stories

News