Nelson & His World

"The subsequent Narrative of the Battle of Copenhagen is chiefly taken from a valuable memoir which an Officer (Stewart) who was with Lord Nelson has furnished, and from the interesting Memoranda of another eye-witness, Mr Ferguson, surgeon of the Elephant, which have been transmitted by Mr Matcham through Sir Thomas Hardy".

Go, boy!

Fergusson, William (1773–1846), inspector-general of army hospitals, was born in Ayr, Scotland, on 19 June 1773. After an education at the Ayr Academy he attended medical classes at Edinburgh University, where he graduated MD; he afterwards trained at various London hospitals. In 1794 he became assistant surgeon in the army, and served in the Netherlands, the West Indies, the Baltic, and Spain, and in the expedition against Guadeloupe in 1815.

After retiring from the service in 1817, Fergusson settled in Edinburgh where he continued to practise medicine. Four years later, he moved to Windsor on the invitation of the duke of Gloucester, on whose staff he had been for twenty years. There Fergusson acquired a lucrative practice both in the town and the surrounding country, which he carried on until 1843, when he was disabled by paralysis. He died on 2 January 1846, at Grove End Road, St John's Wood, London. His Notes and Recollections of a Professional Life (1846), a collection of his papers on various subjects, was published by his son, James Fergusson (1808–1886), an architectural historian. The papers comprising this informative work are not all strictly medical, one considerable section of the book being on military tactics. There is an essay on syphilis in Portugal and its effect on both the British troops and the local inhabitants, which was originally published in Medico-Chirurgical Transactions (1813). However, his most important essay is on the ‘Nature and history of marsh poison’ (1821), reprinted from the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (January 1820). Contemporaries praised the work and its author for his pronouncements on the subject of malaria, gained from experience with British troops in the Netherlands, Portugal, and the West Indies. Fergusson was probably the first to do justice, in a professional sense, to the fact that malarial fevers often occur on dry and barren soils, where rotting vegetation cannot possibly exist. The publication of this work was an important step towards widening and rationalizing the understanding of malaria.