Sir John Forbes

Sir John Forbes FRCP FRS (17 December 1787 – 13 November 1861) was a distinguished Scottish physician, famous for his translation of the classic French medical text De L'Auscultation Mediate by René Laennec, the inventor of the stethoscope. He was physician to Queen Victoria 1841–61.

Forbes was born on 17 December 1787 at Cuttlebrae, near Cullen, in the parish of Rathven, Banffshire, on the Moray Firth in North-East Scotland. His elder brother Alexander is noted for having emigrated to Tepic, Mexico, and for writing the first English-language book on California history.

In order to enlist as a surgeon in the Royal Navy, he proceeded to Edinburgh to obtain the Diploma of the College of Surgeons, passing the examination in February 1806. In 1807 he entered medical service as a temporary assistant surgeon. Apart from a short period of retraining in naval medicine and surgery at Haslar Hospital in 1811, he spent his time at sea. He was confirmed in the rank of full surgeon on 27 January 1809. After his career as a naval surgeon [1806–1816], Forbes then enrolled in the medical school at Edinburgh in 1816, aged 29 years. Dedicated to his work, his Latin dissertation was accepted within a year, proceeding to MD (Edin.) in August 1817.

Dr. Forbes moved to Penzance in September 1817. Between 1817 and 1822 he laid the foundations for his knowledge of the newly invented stethoscope of René Laennec (1781–1826), about the French physician's teaching on stethoscopy: De L'Auscultation Médiate (1819). Forbes translated this into English in four editions between 1821 and 1834. On 19 May 1820 Forbes married Eliza Mary Burgh (1787–1851) at Great Torrington, Devon. He contributed papers to the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall, of which he was secretary, and he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1829. Dr Forbes and his wife moved to Chichester in 1822, where their only child, Alexander Clark Forbes, was born in 1824.

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