London, was a fellow-student, and together they, in this and following years, made many botanical excursions about Edinburgh. With his fellows Balfour seems to have been bon camarade, acquired all the ephemeral distinction attaching to a facile writer of rhymed couplets for occasions, and as an inveterate maker of puns was in demand for the office of punster at the convivial clubs of the period. A mark of more serious attainment—he was President of the Royal Medical Society in two years. After graduation as M.D., when he also became a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh—his thesis for the former being "De Strychnia," for the latter "On Purulent Wounds"—Balfour went in 1832 to Paris to continue his medical education, studying there under Dupuytren, Lisfranc, and Manec. Returning, he settled in Edinburgh in 1834 and entered on practice, becoming assistant within and without the University to Sir George Ballingall, Professor of Military Surgery. Amongst his patients he numbered De Quincey and his family. De Quincey's eldest son died from a cerebral complaint, and the autopsy revealed an interesting pathological condition which formed the subject of Balfour's investigation, and an account of it his first published scientific paper.
From the claims of Medicine Balfour could wrest little time for botanical pursuits, but his holiday always meant the botanical exploration of some area, preferably alpine, and his home became a centre for men of kindred tastes. There in co-operation with his old teacher Graham, and with Greville, Forbes, Falconer, Parnell, Munby and others, was instituted in 1836 the Botanical Society of Edinburgh, with wide aims for the promotion of Botany—amongst them the creation of a botanical library and a herbarium. This has proved a signal service to science. It was the pegging out of a claim which has been made effective. The Society after a life—as with all such societies—of fluctuating periods of greater and lesser activity, flourishes still, and its library and herbarium, transferred to the Crown when the space demand of their bulk became urgent, have been the foundation for the large botanical library and herbarium now maintained and subsidised by Government in the Royal Botanic Garden.
