Born at Islington, the son of Theophilus Thompson, Theophilus Thompson first studied medicine at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. After two years at Edinburgh, where he graduated in 1830, he visited the medical schools of Dublin and Paris. He then began to practise in London and, for the next fourteen years, was physician to the Northern Dispensary. He lectured on the practice of medicine at the Grosvenor Place School and specialised in diseases of the nervous system. He wrote the articles on hysteria, neuralgia, chorea and influenza in Tweedie’s Library of Medicine. His appointment in 1847 as physician to the Brompton Hospital enabled him to study thoracic disease. He published in 1852 a laborious history of influenza epidemics from 1510 to 1837, and in 1855 his Lettsomian Lectures on the same subject. He was one of the first advocates of cod liver oil in the treatment of consumption. His wife was a daughter of Nathaniel Watkin of Stroud.

G H Brown

[Lancet, 1860; D.N.B., lvi, 222]