Charles Creighton

Charles Creighton (November 22, 1847 – July 18, 1927) was a British physician and medical author. He was highly regarded for his scholarly writings on medical history but was widely denounced for disputing the germ theory of infectious diseases.

Creighton was born in Peterhead, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, the oldest son of Alexander Creighton and Agnes Brand Creighton. He received a scholarship to attend the University of Aberdeen and received his M.A. in 1867. He then enrolled as a medical student and passed his M.B. and M.S. exams in 1871. After graduation, he studied for a brief time with Karl von Rokitansky in Vienna and Rudolf Virchow in Berlin. He was awarded his M.D. in 1878.

After returning from Berlin in 1872, Creighton worked in London as a hospital registrar until his appointment in 1876 as demonstrator of anatomy at Cambridge University. Over the next five years he wrote his first book, Bovine Tuberculosis in Man (1881) and published several articles on anatomy in the Journal of Anatomy and Physiology. In 1879 he became co-editor of this same journal.

Then, for unknown reasons, Creighton quit a promising career at Cambridge and returned to London in 1881. For the remainder of his life he worked independently on his studies and lived alone. His most significant work, A History of Epidemics in Britain, took several years to complete and the two volumes were published in 1891 and 1894. It was recognized as an important contribution to the study of medical history.

Some of his other writings were not so well received. Two articles he wrote for the Encyclopædia Britannica on pathology (1885) and vaccinations (1888) cast doubt on the existence of germs and the efficacy of vaccines. He was widely condemned for these views by leading medical journals. He continued to express his unorthodox and unpopular views in The Natural History of Cowpox and Vaccinal Syphilis (1887) and Jenner and Vaccination (1889).

In 1918 Creighton moved to Upper Boddington, Northamptonshire, England where he lived until his death in 1927.

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