Henry Lonsdale

Henry Lonsdale M.D. (1816–1876) was an English physician, now known as a biographer.

Born in Carlisle, Cumberland, he was son of Henry Lonsdale, a tradesman there. After attending a local school he was apprenticed in 1831 to Messrs. Anderson & Hodgson, medical practitioners in Carlisle. In 1834 he went to study medicine at Edinburgh, and was in his third year appointed assistant to Robert Knox the anatomist, and also to John Reid, the physiologist. He studied during the summer of 1838 in Paris, and in passing through London became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons and licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries.

On his return to Edinburgh Lonsdale graduated M.D. In autumn 1838, overworked, he took temporary charge of a country practice at Raughton Head in Cumberland. He helped to found the Inglewood Agricultural Society, a monthly club, the first of its kind in the county. He also gave a course of popular lectures on science, and acquired the friendship of Susanna Blamire, whose poems he subsequently collected. In 1840 Lonsdale returned to Edinburgh and became a partner with his former principal Knox, giving a daily demonstration in anatomy in the class-room and managing the dissecting rooms.

In 1841 Lonsdale was admitted fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. Soon after 1843 he was appointed a senior president of the Royal Medical Society. He was also for two sessions the senior president of the Hunterian Medical Society, and was at the same time senior president of the Anatomical and Physiological Society, which had been revived by Dr. Knox and himself. In 1841 he was appointed physician to the Royal Public Dispensary, where for the first time in Edinburgh he introduced the use of cod-liver oil. During the epidemic of relapsing fever in Edinburgh in 1843, he had charge of the largest outdoor district, and when his three assistants broke down did the work single-handed.

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