James Gregory (physician)

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James Gregory (January 1753 – 2 April 1821) was a Scottish physician.

Gregory was eldest son of John Gregory, was born at Aberdeen, Scotland. He accompanied his father to Edinburgh in 1764, and after going through the usual course of literary studies at that university, he was for a short time a student at Christ Church, Oxford. It was there probably that he acquired that taste for classical learning which afterwards distinguished him. He studied medicine at Edinburgh, and, after graduating doctor of medicine in 1774, spent the greater part of the next two years in Holland, France and Italy. Shortly after his return to Scotland he was appointed in 1776 to the chair his father had formerly held, and in the following year he also entered on the duties of teacher of clinical medicine in the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. On the illness of Dr William Cullen in 1790 he was appointed joint-professor of the practice of medicine, and he became the head of the Edinburgh Medical School on the death of Dr Cullen in the same year. He died on 2 April 1821. As a medical practitioner Gregory was for the last ten years of his life at the head of the profession in Scotland. He was at one time president of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, but his indiscretion in publishing certain private proceedings of the college led to his suspension on the 13 May 1809 from all rights and privileges which pertained to the fellowship.

Besides his Conspectus medicinae theoreticae, published in 1788 as a text-book for his lectures on the institutes, Dr Gregory was the author of "A Theory of the Moods of Verbs", published in the Edin. Phil. Trans. (1787), and of Literary and Philosophical Essays, published in two volumes in 1792.

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.