1802 in Scotland

Incumbents

• Monarch – George III

  Law officers

• Lord Advocate – Charles Hope
• Solicitor General for Scotland – Robert Blair

  Judiciary

• Lord President of the Court of Session – Lord Succoth
• Lord Justice General – The Duke of Montrose
• Lord Justice Clerk – Lord Eskgrove

  Events

• January – Mitchell's Hospital Old Aberdeen admits its first residents.
• 2 October – first Start Point lighthouse on Sanday, Orkney, completed by Robert Stevenson.
• 10 October – the reforming quarterly The Edinburgh Review is first published by Archibald Constable.
• November – the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow is established as the Glasgow Philosophical Society "for the improvement of the Arts and Sciences".
• The planned village of Lybster is established by the local landowner, General Patrick Sinclair.
• The University of Glasgow Medico-Chirurgical Society is established as a student society.
• John Playfair publishes Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth in Edinburgh, popularising James Hutton's theory of geology.
• John Home publishes History of the Rebellion of 1745.
• Malcolm Laing publishes History of Scotland from the Union of the Crowns to the Union of the Kingdoms.

  Births

• 1 April – William Sharpey, anatomist and physiologist
• 20 May – David Octavius Hill, painter and pioneer photographer
• 10 July – Robert Chambers, publisher, geologist and writer
• 16 July – Humphrey Crum-Ewing, Liberal politician
• 20 August – Robert Ferguson, Liberal politician
• 24 August – John Macgregor, shipbuilder
• 28 August – Thomas Aird, poet
• 19 September – Henry Dundas Trotter, admiral
• 10 October – Hugh Miller, geologist
• Thomas Boyd, banker in New South Wales

  Deaths

• 21 January – John Moore, physician and writer
• 26 February – Alexander Geddes, Roman Catholic theologian and scholar
• John Mackay, botanist
• Donald MacNicol, clergyman and writer

  The arts

• 29 January – Greenock Burns Club holds the first Burns dinner, in Alloway.
• Walter Scott's collection of Scottish ballads Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border begins publication anonymously by James Ballantyne in Kelso.