John Abercrombie

The Philosophy of the Moral Feelings, by the Scottish physician John Abercrombie, 1780 to 1844, appeared in 1833 as a companion to his Inquiries concerning the Intellectual Powers of Man and the Investigation of Truth of 1830, and ran through ten English editions in a decade. Born in Aberdeen to a minister's family, Abercrombie took his MA at Marischal College at fifteen and his MD at Edinburgh in 1803, then built the leading consulting practice in Scotland after James Gregory died. His Pathological and Practical Researches on Diseases of the Brain and Spinal Cord (1828) is usually called the first textbook of neuropathology. A companion volume the same year, on the diseases of the intestinal canal, liver and abdomen, carries the earliest confirmed clinical account of a perforated duodenal ulcer. He treated the poor without charge at two Edinburgh dispensaries, helped found what became the Edinburgh Medical Missionary Society, and held an honorary Oxford MD. He died at sixty-four, and his library of roughly a thousand volumes went to the Royal College of Surgeons.