John Roberton (1797)

John Roberton (20 March 1797 – 24 August 1876) was a Scottish physician and social reformer. He was a pioneer of modern obstetrics and of evidence-based medicine, and influential in the intellectual life of Victorian Manchester.

Roberton was born near Hamilton, Lanarkshire and educated for the medical profession at Glasgow and Edinburgh. He was admitted a member of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in 1817. He intended to be a ship's surgeon, and was on his way to the West Indies when he was wrecked on the Lancashire coast. While at Liverpool he was encouraged to take up his residence at Warrington. He became a Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries in 1822, and on 9 October 1823 married Mary (1794/5–1851), daughter of David Bellhouse. The couple subsequently moved to Manchester. He soon had an extensive general practice, and, on his appointment in 1827 to the post of surgeon to the Manchester Lying-in Hospital, turned his special attention to midwifery and to the physiology and diseases of women and children. He was also a lecturer at the Marsden Street School of Medicine. His first publication was Observations on the Mortality and Physical Management of Children (1827). From 1830 onwards he wrote a series of scientific papers for the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal on the time of onset of female puberty in various countries, which led James Cowles Prichard to alter some of the conclusions which he had arrived at in the earlier editions of his Physical History of Mankind. These, along with other similar papers, are reprinted in Roberton's most important work, Essays and Notes on the Physiology and Diseases of Women and on Practical Midwifery (London, 1851). He devoted much time to the subject of hospital construction and the provision of convalescent homes, on which he wrote a number of pamphlets between 1831 and 1861.

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