ON 6 April 1792 James Irving junior, a Scottish slave ship surgeon, met James Currie, an abolitionist and Edinburgh-trained doctor, at Liverpool Infirmary. The occasion for their meeting was a formal examination by Currie and two other practitioners to establish whether Irving had sufficient medical knowledge to qualify for certification under the terms of the Dolben Act of 1788. Irving and Currie were both from Dumfriesshire, and their places of birth in Langholm and Kirkpatrick Fleming were located only fourteen miles apart. In other respects they had little in common. Currie studied medicine in Edinburgh and graduated MD from Glasgow University, whereas Irving was a barber-surgeon whose more limited medical knowledge was built up through his apprenticeship to his older cousin and namesake as a surgeon's mate on slave ships. Their views on the trade in enslaved Africans were diametrically opposed; Currie had already written various condemnations of the trade, whereas Irving had displayed some eagerness in calculating the bonus he would receive depending on how many Africans died in the course of the Middle Passage on the Ellen in 1791.

Other Scottish surgeons, who either felt no moral qualms about the dehumanisation of Africans as cargo or who had become inured to the brutality of the trade, undertook a series of slaving voyages from Liverpool. James Irving senior (later Captain Irving) from Langholm in Dumfriesshire undertook his first slaving voyage on the Vulture in 1783 and five years later persuaded his younger cousin (James Irving junior) to join him as surgeon's mate on his fifth voyage as a surgeon. The Edinburgh-trained surgeon Archibald Dalzel became involved in slave trading following his discharge from the Royal Navy at the end of the Seven Years War. He accepted a position as surgeon at Anomabu fort in the employ of the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa in 1763, and was subsequently appointed as governor of the fort at Whydah in 1767. Born in Kirkliston, West Lothian, Dalzel also captained a number of slave-trading voyages during his career, including one from Liverpool.