David Rorie was a doctor-poet; he studied medicine at Aberdeen and Edinburgh universities, served in the R.A.M.C. during the First World War, and practised in Fife and Aberdeenshire. He was colliery surgeon and an expert on the folk lore of mining. His medical practice and the ways of the folk of rural areas gave him much material for the popular poems and songs which filled his collections:The Auld Doctor and other poems and songs in Scots in 1920 andThe Lum Hat Wantin the Croon and other poems in 1935. Aberdeen University Press brought out David Rorie: poems and prose in 1983.