Henry Duncan Littlejohn

Sir Henry Duncan Littlejohn (1826 – 30 September 1914) was a Scottish surgeon, forensic scientist and public health pioneer.

Henry Littlejohn was born in Edinburgh in 1826 to Thomas Littlejohn, a confectioner of 33 Leith Street, and Isabella Duncan. He began his studies at the Perth Academy and the Royal High School, and continued them at the University of Edinburgh where he studied medicine, graduating with distinction in 1847. He was taught surgery by Prof Monro and Dr Robert Halliday Gunning.

Littlejohn served as Edinburgh's first Medical Officer of Health (1862–1908), introducing model sanitation improvements and the legal requirement to notify cases of infectious diseases. He contributed significantly to the public health movement in Edinburgh and to public health administration and also to urban management. He was assisted in later years by Dr Thomas William Drinkwater FRSE. Littlejohn also co-founded the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh.

Long a lecturer for the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh at Surgeons' Hall, he was appointed to the Chair of Medical Jurisprudence at the University of Edinburgh in 1897.

Serving as Edinburgh's Police Surgeon from 1854 and as Medical Advisor to the Crown in Scotland in criminal cases, he was often called upon as an expert witness. From 1862 he was Edinburgh's first Medical Officer of Health.

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