The Auld Doctor and Other Poems and Songs in Scots

There is a vanishing Scotland preserved in these pages, spoken in a dialect that English readers may find both foreign and strangely familiar. David Rorie was a country doctor who knew his patients not just as ailments, but as full human beings tangled in the business of living and dying in rural Scottish communities. His poems capture the comic misadventures of eccentric patients like Mistress Mackintosh, who rides through a river on a farm gate with the reckless determination of someone who has never let physics dictate her plans. But Rorie's genius lies in how quickly his humor pivots to tenderness: these are poems about a man who sits at sickbeds, delivers bad news, and still finds the wit to describe humanity with devastating accuracy. The Scots language gives these pieces a music that translation cannot replicate, full of sounds that feel like overheard conversation in a bothy. This is not a collection for readers seeking polished literary distance. It is for those who want to hear a world that no longer exists, rendered in the words of someone who loved it enough to sing it back to life.