John Gregory

John Gregory (1724 – 1773), a.k.a. John Gregorie, was an eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment physician, medical writer and moralist.

Gregory moved to Edinburgh in 1764, where he established a medical practice. Two years later he was appointed the first physician in Scotland to George III and made a member of the faculty of Edinburgh University. He published some of his lectures as Observations on the Duties and Offices of a Physician and on the Method of Prosecuting Enquiries in Philosophy (1770). These writings have been called "the first philosophical, secular medical ethics in the English language". Gregory also published Elements of the Practice of Physic (1772), which investigated the nosology of disease and the diseases of children.

In what would become his most famous publication, Gregory wrote A Father's Legacy to his Daughters (1761) after the death of his wife in 1761 to honour her memory and record her thoughts on female education.…more