(3 Sept. 1836-24 Oct. 1879), physician. Born presumably on his parents’ farm, which was on Lot 10 in the 7th Concession of Lochiel Township, near Dalkeith, GC. Parents: Duncan McGillivray, who was the brother of Edward McGillivray mayor of Ottawa, and his wife Margaret McCuaig. He received his medical degree from McGill University in 1861. In the 1860s and 1870s, he contributed articles to the Canada Medical Journal of Montreal. He had a medical practice in Ottawa (with an office on Sparks Street in 1863, and on Wellington Street by 1866), and was physician to the General Protestant Hospital in Ottawa. When the ever-memorable Thomas D’Arcy McGee, poet, orator, Father of Confederation and ex-revolutionary, was shot by an assassin in Ottawa on the night of 7 April 1868, Dr McGillivray was on the scene a few minutes afterwards, and it was he who pronounced McGee dead. Dr McGillivray was one of the two physicians who performed the autopsy on McGee later the same day, and he testified at the coroner’s inquest and at the trial of Patrick J. Whelan. (Whelan was hanged in 1869 for the assassination) Dr McGillivray suffered a mental collapse in the fall of 1877. In June 1878 he was confined in the United Counties jail at Cornwall, in accordance with the contemporary practice of confining the insane first in local prisons, but was soon transferred to the mental hospital at Kingston. He died in the mental hospital the following year, aged only 43. He is buried at the Kirk Hill West cemetery, where he shares a gravestone with his parents. He was not married. He may have been a man of considerable property at one time, but if so, he squandered the assets with the onset of his illness. He was the brother of Archibald Duncan MacGillivray, and the uncle of Archibald and Edmund A. MacGillivray.
This biography is condensed from Royce MacGillivray, “A Forgotten Doctor of the Nineteenth Century and a Note on the Assassination of Thomas D’Arcy McGee,” published in Glengarry Life 1989, where fuller documentation may be found * sources as for his brother Archibald Duncan MacGillivray * geneal. information and 1861 Lochiel Census data kindly supplied by Mrs Mary Beaton * St. Columba CR, 56 * his obituary Ottawa Citizen 25 Oct. 1879 * Ottawa city directories * McGillivray’s medical testimony about the assassination in T. P. Slattery, “They Got to Find Mee Guilty Yet” (1972). Also report on McGee autopsy in Canada Medical Journal, V (1969) 433-437 * record of examination and lt. governor’s warrant for Donald’s committal to the asylum, Archives of Ontario * rediscovery of original record of the McGee inquest, Standard Freeholder 28 Feb. 1940