James Makittrick Adair

James Makittrick Adair MD FRCPE (1728–1802) was a Scottish physician, pamphleteer, and anti-abolitionist.

Early life Born in 1728 in either Inverness or Ayr, to James Makittrick and his wife, the daughter of Robert Adair of Kirkmaiden, Mull of Galloway. Adair adopted his mother's maiden name in 1783. However the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography suggests he was a Doctor living in Ayr. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in 1767. Upon graduation was appointed surgeon's mate of the sloop-of-war HMS Porcupine (1746), bound to the Leeward Islands. Adair's irascible personality led to multiple disputes with his both his professional colleagues and those outside the medical community. These arose partly from a determined opposition to quackery, but was also attributed to his hot temper, as evidenced by his time served in Winchester Gaol for issuing a challenge to a duel.

In addition to his medical work, he published a number of spiritual and satirical works including The Methodist and the Mimick, under nom de plume of Peter Paragraph. Most controversially however, was his 1790 anti-abolitionist pamphlet Unanswerable Arguments against the Abolition of the Slave Trade, where Adair presented an argument that drew from his own experience on the plantations of Antigua, presenting chattel slavery as a paternalistic system that provided a better quality of life for the enslaved people than freedom would.

Family Adair married several times, and had a daughter, Anne Adair, and a son, James Makittrick Adair.

Death and Burial Adair died in Ayr in 1801, and was buried in the churchyard of Alloway Auld Kirk. Earlier versions of the Dictionary of National Biography erroneously stated that he died in Harrogate in 1802, which are in fact the details for his son of the same name.