Robley Dunglison

Robley Dunglison
Born 4 January 1798
Keswick, Cumbria, England
Died 1 April 1869 (aged 71)
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Occupation Physician
Spouse(s) Harriette Leadam

Robley Dunglison (4 January 1798 – 1 April 1869) was an English physician who moved to America to join the first faculty of the University of Virginia. He was personal physician to Thomas Jefferson and considered the "Father of American Physiology".[1][2]

Biography

Robley Dunglison was born in Keswick, Cumbria, England. He studied medicine in London, Edinburgh, and Paris. He obtained his M. D. from the University of Erlangen, Germany, in 1823 [3]

In 1824, Thomas Jefferson and the Board of Visitors of the University of Virginia commissioned Francis Walker Gilmer to find professors in England for his new University. Gilmer offered the anatomy and medicine professorship to Dunglison.[4]

While at UVA, Dunglison published his landmark text Human Physiology (1832), which established his reputation as the “Father of American Physiology.” [5]

In 1832, Dunglison moved to the University of Maryland. Three years later Dunglison became Chair of the Institutes of Medicine and Medical Jurisprudence at the Jefferson Medical College (JMC) in Philadelphia, where he spent the rest of his career.

Marriage and children

Robley Dunglison

Dunglison's offer to become professor of anatomy and medicine at the University of Virginia allowed him to marry Miss Harriette Leadam, whom he had been courting.[6] They were married October 4, 1824, and left England for Virginia at the end of month. They had seven children:[7]

Huntington's Disease

One of Dunglison's recently graduated students at Jefferson Medical College, Charles Oscar Waters, provided his professor with a description of the "magrums" (a folk name for what is now called Huntington's disease), which Waters knew from his travels in Westchester County, New York. Although he had never seen a case, Dunglison included a description of the disease in his 1842 textbook The Practice of Medicine. Waters's account of the disease was one of the first to note that the disease is hereditary, "within the third generation at farthest." Another of Dunglison's students at Jefferson, Charles R. Gorman, wrote his thesis on the magrums as well.[9]


Works

Published works

Notes

  1. Topper, Joby (2005). / University of Virginia, Professor and Physician: Robley Dunglison, M.D..
  2. DUNGLISON, ROBLEY, (1798–1869). collphyphil.org
  3. Radbill, Samuel X., ed. (1963) The Autobiographical Ana of Robley Dunglison, M.D. American Philosophical Society.
  4. Bruce, Philip Alexander (1921). History of the University of Virginia: The Lengthening Shadow of One Man. I. New York: Macmillan. pp. 342, 371.
  5. The National cyclopaedia of American Biography. 10. New York: James T. White and Co. 1909. p. 270.
  6. Hickman, Ellen C. "Dunglison, Robley (1798–1869)". Encyclopedia Virginia. Retrieved 2016-05-04.
  7. Radbill, pp. 4–9
  8. Gray's Anatomy: The Jefferson Years
  9. Wexler, Alice; Nancy Wexler (2008). The Woman Who Walked Into the Sea. Huntington's and the Making of a Genetic Disease. Yale University Press. p. 288. ISBN 978-0-300-10502-5.
  10. Dunglison, Robley; Richard James Dunglison (1876). A Dictionary of Medical Science; Containing a Concise Explanation of the Various Subjects and Terms of Anatomy, Physiology, Pathology, Hygiene, Therapeutics, Medical Chemistry, Pharmacology, Pharmacy, Surgery, Obstetrics, Medical Jurisprudence, and Dentistry; Notices of Climate, and of Mineral Waters; Formulae for Officinal, Empirical, and Dietetic Preparations; with the Accentuation and Etymology of the Terms, and the French and Other Synonyms. Churchill. pp. 1131 pages. Retrieved 2008-06-17.


References

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