Robert Cowie

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Robert Cowie, M.A. and M.D., author of Shetland: descriptive and historical; being a graduation thesis on the inhabitants of the Shetland Islands; and a topographical description of that country (1871), was the son of Dr. John Cowie of Lerwick, where Robert was born in 1842. His brother Archibald Greig Cowie was also an author.

After studying with Sir James Y. Simpson in Edinburgh, Robert inherited his father's practice, besides holding the positions of Admiralty Surgeon and Agent, Medical officer to the Northern Lighthouses, the Prison Board, and to the parochial Boards of Tingwall and Bressay. He also contributed several papers to medical journals, including an article on ' health and longevity,' presented to the International Congress at Paris concerning native Shetlanders. Cowie's interesting volume provides a cross section of history, not least his map of the Roads in Shetland (c. 1870).

Cowie married, in 1869, the youngest daughter of Bailie Smith of Aberdeen, but died suddenly on April 29th 1874, after an attack of peritonitis.

Cowie's book contains a number of engravings and sketches of Shetland, some by John T. Reid, some seemingly unsigned, and others like this view of Scalloway signed C.H.W.

The following image of Lerwick from Fort Charlotte we might conclude is a reasonable representation of the town as Cowie knew it, as he has appended no other date to it. Before the erection of the Lerwick Esplanade, the old town did indeed have something of the appearance of a Northern Venice, that common epithet used by the young Robert Louis Stevenson in his journal of this time.