Journal of Medical Biography

Sir William Newbigging was a surgeon to the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary from 1802. While a dextrous operator, he was regarded principally as an excellent general practitioner. He was President of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh 1814–16 and was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1838. He had five sons, four of whom followed him into the medical profession. Four of his sons died young — only Patrick outlived him. When Patrick returned from a Continental tour in 1842 he joined his father's general practice and when Sir William died in 1852 he took it over. From 1861 to 1863 he was also President of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. His last few years were plagued by ill health and he died in 1864, shortly after his fiftieth birthday.

Sir James Mouat was the first of 36 doctors to win the Victoria Cross. Born in Kent in 1815, he was educated at University College London before joining the army. After service in India and Ireland he joined the 6th Dragoon Guards as regimental surgeon and served with them throughout the Crimean War. He won his VC at the Battle of Balaclava. After the Crimean War he was appointed principal medical officer to the British troops in the New Zealand Wars. After serving in New Zealand he returned to England and became Inspector General of Hospitals. Surgeon General Mouat retired on 28 April 1876. He was appointed an honorary surgeon to the Queen in 1888, and a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath in 1894. He died of a stroke on 4 January 1899 at the age of 83.

After a brief career in public health, Thomas Morison Legge was appointed to become the first medical factory inspector, in 1898, and remained in post until his resignation in 1927. During his tenure in office he became the leading authority on lead poisoning and anthrax; he resigned when the government refused to ratify the White Lead Convention. Subsequently he became the first medical adviser to the Trades Union Congress.

Mary Angharad Guy was born one of three daughters of an affluent seafaring family. After preclinical education in Cardiff she proceeded to Charing Cross Hospital, London, for her clinical studies and on qualification worked with eminent men. She married John Guy, who became county medical officer for Westmorland, and they had three children. She gave up her career after marriage and it was another 15 years before she returned to work, to undertake school and baby clinics. She was a woman of outstanding promise and gifted artistically, but she was caught in a social trap between the wars, when women were expected to give up professional careers on marriage.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, when the typical course of various febrile clinical phenomena was found to be specific to particular infectious diseases, Carl Liebermeister successfully pioneered the investigation of the pathophysiology of fever and the regulation of body temperature. He applied biophysical and pharmacological antipyresis, especially for the treatment of typhoid fever, and developed new statistical tools for the evaluation of therapeutic results.

Fielding Hudson Garrison once remarked that because his birthday fell on 5 November, Guy Fawkes Day, he was “fated to suffer from in-ward hell-fire and brimstone all [his] life”. Though said in jest, Garrison was a vulnerable, melancholic and self-confessed lonely man who found solace in the papers, periodicals and books of the Army Medical Library — today's National Library of Medicine. Over the course of approximately 25 years, and often while working in his spare time, Garrison went from a clerk in the world's largest medical library to America's pioneering and, arguably, most prolific medical historian, past or present.

Johann Christoph Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) is remembered today for his contributions to literature and aesthetic theory — it is less well known that his first career was in medicine (an army appointment). Scholars have generally held that his primary interest lay in psychology and the psychological aspects of medicine, and that his commitment to other aspects of medicine was perfunctory at best. The present paper argues that a study of Schiller's three medical dissertations — two on psychological aspects of medicine and one on fevers — reveals his attempt “to maintain a balance” between the mind and the body in his approach to medicine.

The iconography of the healing Buddha embraces two healing traditions, symbolized by the healing stone lapis lazuli from Central Asia and by the myrobalan fruit from the ayurvedic medicine of ancient India. The first mention of the healing Buddha is in Buddhist texts of the first century BC, and the earliest extant icons date from the fourth century AD. This suggests the cult of the healing Buddha was a relatively late development in the history of Buddhism. Worshippers sought his help in alleviating spiritual, mental and physical suffering, as well as for medical cures. In China followers believed he was also a cosmic Buddha, to whom one appealed for longevity and protection from disasters. This form of faith-based healing remains vibrant in China, Japan and Tibet to this day.