Sir William Tennant Gairdner

Sir William Tennant Gairdner (8 November 1824 – 28 June 1907) was a Professor of Medicine in the University of Glasgow.

William Tennant Gardiner was the son of Dr. John Gairdner, a physician in Edinburgh, and was born there on 8 November 1824. He was the elder brother of the historian James Gairdner. He was educated at the Edinburgh Institution and then in his father's profession at the University of Edinburgh, graduating as M.D. in 1845. Immediately after his graduation he went to Rome for six months. He was taught surgery by Prof Monro and Dr Robert Halliday Gunning.

In 1850 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh; and a year or two later was appointed physician and pathologist to the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh. He filled these offices until 1862, when he accepted an invitation to take the professorship of medicine in the University of Glasgow, together with the post of physician to the Western Infirmary. In the following year much attention was directed in Glasgow to the insanitary state of the city; and Dr. Gairdner, at considerable pecuniary sacrifice, undertook the duties of medical officer of health, which he discharged for ten years in such a manner as brought about a total change in the conditions which he found existing. From this time forward he devoted himself to the duties of his professorship and to his increasing consulting practice.

The professor of medicine in a University like that of Glasgow is expected, almost as a matter of course, to be become an important contributor to the advancement of the science which he teaches, and his duty Gairdner abundantly fulfilled. He did excellent work in this direction both as a sanitarian, as an original investigator of diseases of the heart, and in opposition to the excessive alcoholic stimulation of fevers, which had been rendered fashionable for a time by the teaching of Dr. Todd. His personal influence over successive generations of students was, however, greatly more remarkable and more important than his purely medical achievements.

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