Charles Murchison (physician)

Charles Murchison (26 July 1830 – 23 April 1879) was a British physician and a noted authority on fevers and diseases of the liver.

After further study in Dublin and Paris, Murchison entered the Bengal Army of the East India Company on 17 January 1853.

Later on, he served with the expedition to Burma in 1854, and his experience there furnished the materials for two papers in the Edinburgh Medical Journal for January and April 1855 on the "Climate and Diseases of Burmah".

In 1871, when St. Thomas's Hospital was being enlarged, Murchison accepted the posts of physician and lecturer on medicine, which he held until his death.

In the autumn of 1873 he traced the origin of an epidemic of typhoid fever to a polluted milk supply, and the residents in West London presented him with a testimonial.

[3] In July 1859 Murchison married Clara Elizabeth, third daughter of Robert Bickersteth, a Liverpool surgeon.

In the morning of 23 April 1879, while seeing patients in his consulting room, he died suddenly of heart disease affecting the aortic valves.

After translating Frerichs's work on that subject for the New Sydenham Society in 1861, he published Clinical Lectures on Diseases of the Liver, Jaundice, and Abdominal Dropsy (1868).

In 1874 he took as the subject of his Croonian Lectures at the Royal College of Physicians "Functional Derangements of the Liver"; a French translation by Jules Cyr appeared in Paris in 1878.

His regard for the memory of his friend, Dr. Hugh Falconer, induced him to take great pains in bringing out the latter's Palæontological Memoirs in 1868; geology was a favourite pursuit with Murchison.