Levi Myers (1767-1822): An eighteenth century Glasgow medical graduate from South Carolina

Levi Myers, a native of Georgetown, South Carolina, was the first Jewish medical graduate at the University of Glasgow, obtaining the MD, in 1787. Myers had been registered for studies at the University of Edinburgh for three years, from 1785/1786 to 1787/1788, after some years of training with a physician in Charleston, South Carolina. Recent studies of Jewish life in Edinburgh have revealed the evidence of a settled group of Jewish inhabitants in the city during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, during the time of Myers' sojourn in Edinburgh and thirty years before the formal inauguration of Scotland's first Jewish community. This paper examines the context of Myers' studies in Edinburgh as an American medical student and as a Jew.