Robley Dunglison was born in Keswick, Cumbria, England. He studied medicine in London, Edinburgh, and Paris. He obtained his M. D. from the University of Erlangen, Germany, in 1823 In 1824, Thomas Jefferson and the Board of Visitors of the University of Virginia commissioned Francis Walker Gilmer to find professors in England for his new University. Gilmer offered the anatomy and medicine professorship to Dunglison. While at UVA, Dunglison published his landmark text Human Physiology, which established his reputation as the “Father of American Physiology.” A dormitory at UVA has been named in honor of Dunglison. In 1832, Dunglison moved to the University of Maryland. Three years later Dunglison became Chair of the Institutes of Medicine and Medical Jurisprudence at the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, where he spent the rest of his career.
Marriage and children
Dunglison's offer to become professor of anatomy and medicine at the University of Virginia allowed him to marry Miss Harriette Leadam, whom he had been courting. They were married 4 October 1824, and left England for Virginia at the end of month. They had seven children:
Harriette Elizabeth
John Robley
a son, born in 1828, died of bronchitis at 11 months
William Leadam
Richard James -- earned MD at JMC in 1856; editor of First American Edition of Gray's Anatomy in 1859
Thomas Randolph
Emma Mary
Huntington's Disease
One of Dunglison's recently graduated students at Jefferson Medical College, Charles Oscar Waters, provided his professor with a description of the "magrums", which Waters knew from his travels in Westchester County, New York. Although he had never seen a case, Dunglison included a description of the disease in his 1842 textbook The Practice of Medicine. Waters's account of the disease was one of the first to note that the disease is hereditary, "within the third generation at farthest." Another of Dunglison's students at Jefferson, Charles R. Gorman, wrote his thesis on the magrums as well.
Works
Published works
1824 Commentaries on Diseases of the Stomach and Bowels of Children
1832 Human Physiology
1833 A New Dictionary of Medical Science and Literature. The 2nd, 3rd, and 5th editions added "Medical Lexicon" to the title page.
