A native of Dumfries, Robert Dickson was educated at the Royal High School, Edinburgh, and Edinburgh University. Having graduated as M.D. at the age of twenty-one, he supplemented his studies with visits to Germany and Paris, before settling in London. His practice was constant but never large, his prospects being marred by his failure, in 1848, to be elected physician to St. George’s Hospital, where he had lectured on botany for many years. He was also lecturer on this subject at the Webb Street School of Medicine and had an unsurpassed knowledge of vegetable remedies, which he was wont to prescribe generously. He held the appointments of physician to the Scottish Hospital, the London Orphan Asylum, and the Soldiers’ Daughters’ Home at Hampstead. In his private life, he was a patron of art and music, an authority on wines, and an enthusiast for public baths. He strongly resented the assumption by strangers that he was the unorthodox Dr. Samuel Dickson, author of Fallacies of the Faculty, who paid him the insult of residing in the next street. Dickson married Mary Ann Coope in 1834 and was survived by six children.

G H Brown

[Medical Times and Gazette, 1875; D.N.B., xv, 44]