James Currie (physician)

James Currie FRS (31 May 1756 in Dumfriesshire, Scotland – 31 August 1805 in Sidmouth) was a Scottish physician, best known for his anthology and biography of Robert Burns and his medical reports on the use of water in the treatment of fever. A watercolour portrait by Horace Hone (1756–1825) is in the National Galleries of Scotland.

His early attempt to set up a merchanting business in Virginia was a failure and he returned to Scotland. After qualifying as a medical doctor he established a successful practice in Liverpool, England and after a few years was able to purchase a small estate in Dumfriesshire. He became a Fellow of the London Medical Society and was a founder member of the Liverpool Literary Society. He was an early advocate of the abolition of slavery and wrote several political letters and pamphlets, including one to William Pitt, which made him a number of enemies.

Throughout his life he was dogged by illness and in 1804 he became seriously unwell. In an effort to find a cure, he relinquished his Liverpool practice and went to Bath, Clifton and finally Sidmouth, where he died on 31 August 1805 at age 49.

He was born in Kirkpatrick-Fleming, in Annandale, Dumfriesshire, a son of the minister, the Reverend James Currie, and Jane, the only daughter of Robert Boyd, of Dumfries. The Curries were an old Scottish family, descended from the Curries of Dunse, Berwickshire, and originally from the Corrie family of Annandale. James's first school was in the nearby parish of Middlebie, in Annandale, where his father had become Minister, and from age 13 he attended the grammar school in Dumfries, run by Dr George Chapman.

After a period in America, described below, he returned in 1776 to Scotland to study medicine at Edinburgh. During his first year at university he contracted rheumatic fever, a disease which recurred periodically throughout his life. He obtained his degree of M.D. in Glasgow and in 1780 settled in Liverpool, where he was appointed as one of the physicians at the infirmary.

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