He was born in
Edinburgh, the son of David Sibbald (brother of Sir
James Sibbald) and Margaret Boyd (January 1606 – 10 July 1672). Educated at the
Royal High School and the Universities of
Edinburgh,
Leiden, and
Paris, he took his doctor's degree at the
University of Angers in 1662, and soon afterwards settled as a physician working in Edinburgh. He resided at "Kipps Castle" near
Linlithgow. In 1667 with Sir
Andrew Balfour he started the botanical garden in Edinburgh, and he took a leading part in establishing the
Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, of which he was elected president in 1684. Both Sibbald and Balfour were proponents of the
Edinburgh Pharmacopoeia. In 1682, Sibbald began assembling material for a projected two volume geographical description or atlas of Scotland, recruiting parish ministers and members of the nobility and gentry to assist him in the task. While the work was never published, many of the manuscripts describing aspects of the geography, natural history and antiquities of parts of Scotland have survived. In 1685 he was appointed the first professor of medicine at the
University of Edinburgh. He was knighted, named Physician to the King, and appointed
Geographer Royal in 1682. His numerous and miscellaneous writings deal with historical and antiquarian as well as with botanical and medical subjects. He based many of his cartographical studies on the work of
Timothy Pont. He is buried in
Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh in a vault against the southern wall.
Sibbaldia procumbens (Rosaceae), that Sibbald described and illustrated in his book
Scotia illustrata in 1684 (volume 2, tab. 6(1)), was named after him in 1753 by
Carl Linnaeus.
Sibbaldia is a
genus of about 13 species of
flowering plants. In 1941, the Russian botanist
Sergei Vasilievich Juzepczuk (1893-1959) published
Sibbaldianthe, also in the family Rosaceae, which has about 7 species. ==Taxonomy of the blue whale—
Sibbaldus==