George Pearson (doctor)

George Pearson, MD, FRS (1751–1828) was a British physician, chemist and early advocate of Jenner's cowpox vaccination.

Davies Gilbert, who was then President of the Royal Society, began his 1829 memoir (written anonymously) of Dr. Pearson thus:

He continued:

Pearson studied in Edinburgh, took his MD in 1771 and went to study for a year at St. Thomas's Hospital. He settled in Doncaster in 1777. In his six years there he became a close friend of John Philip Kemble and analyised the water at Buxton, about which he produced a two-volume work. In 1783 he moved to London, to Leicester Square, and was admitted a Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians on 25 June 1784. He began to lecture. He was elected (chief) Physician of St George's Hospital on 23 February 1787, and was there for the next forty years. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on 23 June 1791. (He served on the Society's Council in 1802 and in 1827, in which year he gave the Bakerian Lecture, Researches to discover the Faculties of Pulmonary Absorption with respect to Charcoal).

Davies went on:

On Sunday 9 November 1828 he died at his home in George Street (9 St. George Street),Hanover Square, in Davies' words: 'in consequence of a fall down stairs'.

He left two daughters; one, Frances Priscilla, married John Dodson, DCL (and formerly M. P.), and the other, Mary-Anne, was, once again as Davies put it in 1828, single.

His first application to the Royal Society had been rejected on ballot 15 June 1786, when his neighbour and St. George's colleague John Hunter (surgeon) had been his lead proposer.

For his second attempt in 1791 Pearson's proposers were George Baker; William Heberden; Robert Hallifax (Royal physician); William Seward; John Gunning; Andrew Kippis; Thomas Bowdler; James Keir; Maxwell Garthshore; James Carmichael Smyth; Bp. Landaff; George Staunton; John Paradise; William Young; John Ash; Tiberius Cavallo; William Watson; Dr. (?) Gray; John Gillies.

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