John Forbes

John Forbes' (1787-1861), physician and medical journalist, was born on 17 December 1787 at Cuttlebrae in Banffshire, North-East Scotland. He was the fourth son of a tenant farmer, Alexander Forbes and Cicilia Wilkie.

Between 1803 and 1805 Forbes entered the Arts course of Marischal College, Aberdeen, and then went to Edinburgh to obtain the diploma of the Royal College of Surgeons, passing the examination in February 1806. The following year he entered the naval medical service as a temporary assistant surgeon. Between 1807 and 1816 his time was spent mostly at sea. He was promoted to full surgeon on 27 January 1809, after serving on the Royal George, the 100-gun flagship of the Channel Fleet. He later saw action against the French in the Caribbean (1809-10) and in the North Sea squadron blockading the Dutch coast and attacking ports on the river Elbe (1811-13).

In 1816, Forbes enrolled in the medical school at Edinburgh, graduating with an MD in August 1817 on the same day as his old schoolfriend, friend James Clark. During his medical studies Forbes had attended geology lectures given by Professor Robert Jamieson. When, fortuitously, Professor Jamieson asked to recommend an Edinburgh physician with an interest in geology for a medical practice in Penzance, Cornwall, he recommended Forbes, who duly moved to Penzance in September 1817.

In 1818 Clark had brought back from Paris an early model of the newly invented stethoscope of René Laënnec (1781-1826). Clark was enthusiastic about the French physician’s teaching on stethoscopy as expressed in his classical work De L’Auscultation Médiate (1819), and, prompted Forbes to translate this into English. His first translation A Treatise on Diseases of the Chest (1821) was instrumental in spreading Laënnec’s teachings to the English-speaking world.

On 19 May 1820, Forbes married Eliza Mary Burgh (1787-1851). He took a keen interest in local Cornish academic activities, contributing papers to the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall, of which he was secretary. One of his papers drew attention to the health of Cornish tin and copper miners, including studies of their working conditions and the stethoscopic signs of pulmonary tuberculosis.

John Forbes and his wife moved to Chichester in 1822, where their only child, Alexander Clark Forbes, was born on 18 April 1824. At Chichester, Forbes wrote his major medical work Original Cases with Dissections and Observations illustrating the use of the Stethoscope and Percussion in the diagnosis of Diseases of the Chest (1824). Original Cases was favourably reviewed by The Lancet (Anon 1824).

Forbes combined private medical practice with his hospital work at the new Chichester Infirmary for fourteen years. In collaboration with two other Edinburgh graduates, Dr John Conolly (1794-1866), and Alexander Tweedie (1794-1884), Forbes launched a Cyclopaedia of Practical Medicine in four volumes (Forbes et al. 1832-35).

In 1836, Forbes and Conolly started a new publication in 1836: the British and Foreign Medical Review, or, A Quarterly Journal of Practical Medicine''.

On 15 October 1840, John Forbes resigned as senior physician at Chichester Infirmary in order to take up residence at 12 Old Burlington Street, Westminster. On 15 February 1841, Forbes was appointed court physician to Prince Albert (1819-1861) and the royal household. Further honours followed: Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians was conferred on him in 1844 and honorary fellowship of the Imperial Society of Physicians in Vienna in 1845.