A wonderful Oxford medical association copy of A New Pocket Companion for Oxford (1809), surely inscribed by the University’s Aldrichian Professor of Physic, Dr Robert Bourne*, perhaps to a visiting relative: “Susan Bourne, presented to her by Dr Bourne, 1809,” and featuring contemporary annotations updating University appointments (1809-14), presumably in the recipient’s hand: “William Wyndham Grenville Lord Grenville elected Chancellor 1810 [...and...] Dr Robertson succeeded Dr Hornsby who (died 1809) as Professor of Astronomy and Natural Philosophy”.
In 1809 Dr Robert Bourne (1761–1829) was Aldrichian Professor of Physic at the University of Oxford (as listed on p. 117 of the Pocket Companion) and Physician to the Radcliffe Infirmary from 1787. Having been elected a fellow of the Royal College in 1790, he gave the Harveian Oration in 1797. Five years before his death, in 1824, he was appointed the University’s Lichfield Chair of Clinical Medicine. Alongside Dr Martin Wall and Sir Christopher Pegge, Bourne was “one of the most important doctors in Oxford in the early nineteenth century,” and was memorialised and mocked alongside them in the punning contemporary verse, ‘The Oxford medical trio’: “I would not call in any one of them all,/ [...] While the third, with the fees he so silently earns,/ Is ‘the bourne whence no traveller ever returns’”. A monument was also erected in his honour in the chapel of his college, Worcester.
In his proximal family, it appears that only Bourne’s second sister was Susan/nah Bourne, who married in December 1809, and remained in Worcestershire. Given the formality of his inscription (“presented to her by Dr Bourne”), perhaps Bourne’s inscribee was a distant family member visiting Oxford for the first time?
*According to Alumni Oxonienses, 1715-1886, the University produced no other Bourne M.D.s, while no other Bournes with University Chairs appear in The Historical Register of the University of Oxford (1888).