Journal of medical biography
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Biography Historical Article
Dr James Currie (1756-1805): Liverpool physician, campaigner, hydrotherapist and man of letters.
James Currie was born and educated in Scotland but spent most of his professional life in Liverpool, where, as physician to the Liverpool Infirmary, he campaigned against the unsanitary living conditions in the rapidly growing port. He was an early advocate of water cures for fever and other maladies, on which subject he carried out experiments and published a seminal work. ⋯ These included Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), William Wilberforce (1759-1833), Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820) and Robert Burns (1759-96), of whose poetry Currie was the first editor. He died in August 1805 at Sidmouth in Devon, whose parish church carries his memorial.
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Biography Historical Article
Ernest Henry Starling (1866-1927): the scientist and the man.
The pre-eminent achievements of the English physician and physiologist Ernest Henry Starling were his quantitative explanation of the transcapillary transport of fluid, the discovery of the first hormone, secretin, and his formulation of the law of the heart. In some ways Starling was an outsider and he was the centre of several scientific and social controversies. However, throughout his life he stressed fundamental scientific attitudes and ideas with remarkable persistence and power, although also balance, and his scientific achievements have stood the test of time.
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Biography Historical Article
Sir Stuart Threipland (1716-1805), physician-in-chief to Prince Charles Edward Stuart during the Jacobite uprising of 1745.
Stuart Threipland (1716-1805), the son of Sir David Threipland, second baronet of Fingask Castle, was an ardent Jacobite. He obtained the Edinburgh MD degree in 1742, was admitted a fellow of the Edinburgh College of Physicians in 1744 and was elected its President in 1766. ⋯ While he succeeded to the baronetcy after the death of his father in 1746, he was not technically allowed to use this title during his lifetime because his father's title and ancestral estates had been confiscated after the Battle of Sheriffmuir in 1715. He practised in Edinburgh for the rest of his life and outlived all of the other great Jacobite figures involved in the 1745 uprising.