From REMINISCENCES (of his mother’s family) by James H. Jameson*

	My dear Aunt Jane was the youngest daughter and the second youngest child of my grandparents.  She was very fair, and very charming, and carried herself with the air of a Queen.  She was named after Jane Hart**, Major Hart’s sister.  She was always a staunch and affectionate friend of mine – and of my mother.  The Doctor and she kept open house and 30 Charlotte Square and at their country residences, and afterwards at 71 Brook Street, London.  Their early married life was darkened by a distressing calamity at Charlotte Square.  Their first children were twins, Jamie and Willie, and when these boys were five years old they got out of bed in the nurse’s absence – to play at the fire and Jamie’s nightgown took fire – and he died of his injuries.   A few years later they lost their daughter ‘Doddy’  - a lovely child of four – through meningitis, brought on, it was said, by eating sand on the sea-shore.

	We lunched every Sunday at Charlotte Square – and when the British Association met in Edinburgh, I remember meeting at their dinner table Sir William Thomson (Kelvin), F.G. Tait, Huxley, Norman Lockyer, the astronomer, Sylvester, the mathematician, and other great savants.  After Sir James Y. Simpson’s death Dr. Duncan by universal consent ought to have succeeded him in the Chair of Midwifery in Edinburgh University, but there was a job – and he was passed over.  Very soon after he was offered a chair at St. Bart’s in London – which he accepted – and Edinburgh saw him no more.

	This departure to London was an irreparable loss to us.  James Matthews Duncan was not only at the top of his profession in Scotland but afterwards in London attained the highest distinction.  He had a charming disposition, and was kindness itself to those he liked, but he could be brusque, and even rude to fools and humbugs.  After my good father’s death, when I was fifteen, he became to me a second father, and no living person had so much effect in molding my intellectual life.  He had a great mind, and was a great personality and I received great encouragement in my scientific and literary studies from him.  To pass from the dreary inanities of the Hotchkis family to conversation with him in his leisure hours was like passing into brilliant sunshine from a dull, drab fog.  Moreover, to him I owed my life.  For when I lay at death’s door at Ladyfield in my eighth year in a relapse of typhoid fever, he arrived just in time to save my life. That disastrous illness was the cause of all my subsequent ill health which I did not shake off till almost my fortieth year.  The happiest [years] of my life before my marriage were those spent with the Duncans at Ashiestiel, and it was there that I learned to love and venerate the Doctor as one of the wisest and best of men.  He was disappointed I did not adopt medicine as my career, but in my state of health I could not have stood the sever curriculum, to say nothing of my hatred of the Dissecting Room.  My scientific interests lay in a quite different direction.  Dr. Duncans death in 1891 at the age of only 64 was a great sorrow to us all.  In spite of his great success in London he went there too old to acquire the tone of London life and accommodate himself to so radical a change. He used to tell me that he never drove along a London street without shivering expecting every moment a crash up.  Also he lost all his old friends, and the new ones he made could never be the same.

	My Aunt Jane survived to 1916 when she died at Minstead in the New Forest surrounded by her devoted children.  

*James H. Jameson (1855-1937) was the son of Sheriff Andrew Jameson (1811-1870).  

**Her great aunt.