Identity area
Type of entity
Authorized form of name
Parallel form(s) of name
Standardized form(s) of name according to other rules
Other form(s) of name
Identifiers for corporate bodies
Description area
Dates of existence
History
George Gregory was born on 16 August 1790 at Canterbury, the son of William Gregory, clergyman and preacher of Canterbury Cathedral, and grandson of John Gregory, professor of medicine at Edinburgh University. He received his early education at King's School, Canterbury. His father died in 1803 and he went to live in Edinburgh with his uncle the physician James Gregory, author of the Conspectus Medicinae Theoreticae (1780-82).
Gregory studied medicine at Edinburgh University from 1806-9. He continued his studies in London at St George's Hospital and the Windmill Street School of Anatomy. At Windmill Street he was under the tutelage of the anatomist Matthew Baillie, a friend of Gregory's father from their early lives at Baliol College, Oxford. Gregory returned to Edinburgh and graduated MD in 1811.
He became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1812, and the following year was sent as assistant surgeon to the forces in the Mediterranean engaged in the Napoleonic Wars. He served in Sicily and in Italy, at the capture of Genoa. At the end of war in 1815 he retired on half pay and returned to England. In 1816 he was elected a licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians and began practice in London. He gave lectures at the Windmill Street School, and then at St Thomas's Hospital.
Gregory made many contributions to the medical journals, the Cyclopaedia of Practical Medicine, Sir John Forbes, John Conolly, and Alexander Tweedie (eds.) (1833-35), and Alexander Tweedie's (ed.) Library of Medicine (1840-42). His own major publication was Elements of the Theory and Practice of Physic (1820, 6th ed. 1846). He was made physician to the Smallpox and Vaccination Hospital in 1824, and subsequently wrote numerous articles on smallpox and vaccination. He was also physician at the General Dispensary. He became a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1839, and was a fellow of the Royal Society. In 1843 he published his Lectures on Eruptive Fevers.
He died at Camden Square, London, of heart disease on 25 January 1853, and was buried at Kensal Green cemetery.
Publications:
Elements of the Theory and Practice of Physic (London, 1820, 6th ed. 1846)
Lectures on Eruptive Fevers, delivered at St Thomas's Hospital in January 1843 (London, 1843)