Born at Dalry, Ayrshire on 6 May 1882 eldest eon of Andrew Aitken, wool manufacturer, and Anne Hogarth his wife. He was educated at Glasgow High School and University. He acted as house physician and house surgeon at the Victoria Infirmary and was afterwards house surgeon at the Glasgow Hospital for Sick Children. He served as prosector and as demonstrator of anatomy under Professor John Cleland at the University of Glasgow and then came to London, attached himself to the London Hospital, took his FRCS, and studied at the Tottenham Hospital and at the Throat and Ear Hospital in Golden Square. For a time he practised at Sunderland, but during the war he was gazetted captain in the RAMC on 1 June 1916, was posted first to Lincoln, then to Ripon, and finally went to France as surgical specialist at various casualty clearing stations. He returned to Sunderland on demobilization in 1919 but was soon invited to join G M Gray, FRCS in partnership at Lagos, Nigeria. The two partners soon re-organized the Creek Hospital, assumed responsible charge of the clinical and operative work of the African Hospital with 200 beds, and started a medical school at Yaba, five miles from Lagos. From this training-school Africans, after a four years' course ended by an examination, could be placed upon the Nigerian medical register. Aitken married Edith May Palmer on 7 February 1914 and died suddenly whilst bathing on 8 December 1935. She survived him, without children. He attended the Yellow Fever conference at Dakar in 1928 and received the French silver médaille des epidémies in recognition of his services to tropical medicine. It is said of him that he was very silent and reserved with no bedside manner, grim to those who tried to deceive him, but whole-heartedly attentive to those who were really ill. Publications:- Note on the insertion of the rectus abdominis muscle. *Glasg med J*. 1912, 78, 171. Case of doubling of the great intestine. *Ibid*. p 431.