D.D.Cunn.

David Douglas Cunningham CIE FRS (29 September 1843 – 31 December 1914) was a Scottish doctor and researcher who worked extensively in India on various aspects of public health and medicine. He studied the spread of bacteria and the spores of fungi through the air and conducted research on cholera. In his spare time he also studied the local plants and animals.

Cunningham was born in 1843, in Prestonpans, the third son of the Rev. William Bruce Cunningham (1806–78) and Cecilia Margaret Douglas (1813–98), daughter of David Douglas, Lord Reston (1769–1819), the heir of Adam Smith. He attended the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, and graduated with Honours in Medicine from Edinburgh University in 1867. His brother Robert 0. Cunningham also became a surgeon and zoologist. He entered the Indian Medical Service in 1868, and was selected to conduct a special enquiry into cholera by the Secretaries of State for India and for War. He studied for a time in Munich, and arrived in Calcutta in January 1869 along with another physician Timothy Richards Lewis (1841–1886). From 1874 he was appointed as a special assistant to the sanitary commissioner of India. In June 1879 he was appointed Professor of Physiology in the Medical College, Calcutta, where he was much engaged in the investigation of cholera. There were multiple competing theories on the nature of diseases in general and cholera in particular. There was a "miasma" theory that certain locations had bad air that led to disease and there was a "contagion" theory that particles of causal agents entered the body to cause disease and could be carried by a person. In addition there were questions on whether the two theories may both hold and that cholera was caused by a fungus-like organism that produced spores that would be distributed in the air. Cunningham examined many of these theories in India. He was appointed Surgeon Major of the Bengal Medical Service by 1888 and Honorary Surgeon to the Viceroy of India. He was selected as the Naturalist for the Tibet Mission of 1886.

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