Early Life and Career
Balmain was born at Balhepburn in the Parish of Rhynd, Perthshire, Scotland, to Alexander Balmain (b. 1714), tenant farmer, and his second wife, Jane Henderson. Little is known of his early life but in 1779 he was enrolled as a medical student at Edinburgh University. Next year he entered the Royal Navy to train as a Surgeon's Mate.
From November 1784 he served on Nautilus during a survey of the Das Voltas region of South West Africa (Namibia) which the British government was considering as a possible destination for the convicts then overcrowding British prisons and hulks.
On 21 October 1786 Balmain applied to join the group of officers to establish the new colony in New South Wales and was appointed third assistant surgeon to the principal surgeon, John White. Eleven ships, including six transports, carried 772 convicts, officers, marines, crews, and some wives and children, travelled more than 10,000 miles (16,000 km) to reach the unknown shore. Before the fleet sailed, Balmain correctly diagnosed a prevalent convict illness at Portsmouth. He sailed as surgeon on the convict ship Alexander. On the voyage he delivered the Fleet's first child.
Read more about this topic: William Balmain
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or career:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed
And the great star early drooped in the western sky in the night,
I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“All my life I’ve been running, from welfare officers, thugs, my father. See, there they are [the killers]. There on the bridge. I’m a dead man. Nosseros told me that. He told me. He said, “You got it all, but you’re a dead man, Harry Fabian.””
—Jo Eisinger, and Jules Dassin. Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark)
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)