Occupation Physician | Name Robley Dunglison | |
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Born 4 January 1798 Keswick, Cumbria, England Died 1869, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States Spouse Harriette Leadam (m. 1824) Education University of Erlangen-Nuremberg Books Human Health, History of Medicine from the Earliest Ages to the Commencement of the Nineteenth Century | ||
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".
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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
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.
While at UVA, Dunglison published his landmark text Human Physiology (1832), which established his reputation as the “Father of American Physiology.”
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
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. They were married October 4, 1824, and left England for Virginia at the end of month. They had seven children:
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.