| After studying at Edinburgh he became a military surgeon with the 6th Inniskilling Regiment of Dragoons seeing action in Flanders during the War of the Austrian Succession. After the war he returned to medical studies, gaining his MD in 1750. He wrote many works on disease and medicine and experimented in the use of vaccines to mitigate the effects of measles. In 1751 he became a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh and succeeded Cullen as President in 1775. He was also the first Professor of Materia Medica at Edinburgh University. He is mentioned by Dr Joshua Sampson because of his work on dropsy in ‘Medical Facts and Experiments’ (London, 1759). He died in 1813 at the age of 94 and was buried at Earlston in Berwickshire. |
