He was born on 18 November 1865 near Tobermory, the son of Isabella Ritchie and her husband, John Alexander Thomson.
[1] His family moved to Glasgow in his youth and his father became headmaster of Green Street School.
His proposers were John Gray McKendrick, James Bottomley, Magnus Maclean and Alexander Galt.
[4] At the end of the war he set up in private practice in Johannesburg back in South Africa.
[6] In 1920 he was appointed as the first Professor of Surgery at the Witwatersrand University in South Africa, assisted by Dr Joseph J. Levin and the anaesthetist F. D.