Evan Buchanan Baxter

Evan Buchanan Baxter, M.D., (1844–14 January 1885) was a Russian-born Scottish physician, who lived and worked for most of his life in London.

Soon afterwards, on being appointed government inspector of schools in the province of Podolsk, Russian Poland, his father took up his residence at Kaminetz, where Evan was brought up and educated till the age of sixteen under the care of his parent and an old French tutor.

"The only profession," he said, "which attracted me was that of medicine, holding out, as it did, an opportunity for the study of physical science and a hope of comparative intellectual freedom."

In 1865 he was elected a junior scholar, and in the same year he carried off the Dasent prize with an essay on "The Minor Poems of Milton".

It was at this time that he began to be appreciated not only as a man of the first intellectual calibre, but also as a great teacher and an extraordinary careful clinical observer.

Baxter translated Rindfleisch's Pathological Histology for the New Sydenham Society; prepared the fourth edition of Garrod's Essentials of Materia Medica; and made some valuable experiments on "The Action of the Chinchona Alkaloids and their Congeners on Bacteria and Colourless Blood Corpuscles" described in the Practitioner (1873).