His body was never found, but forensic studies in 2009 on skeletal remains earlier recovered from King William Island in Canada suggest that they may be those of Harry Goodsir.

John Goodsir, his elder brother, would become Professor of Anatomy at Edinburgh University and a pioneer of the doctrine that cells formed the basis of living organisms.

[4] It was this book that was to win John Goodsir international acclaim and led to the German pathologist Rudolph Virchow dedicating his epoch-making volume to him.

[5] Goodsir's final communication was a paper entitled "On the anatomy of Forbesia", which was "... transmitted by the author from Disko Island in Greenland in June 1845.

[8][9] Robert Goodsir graduated as a medical doctor from St. Andrews University in 1852, but rarely practiced medicine, travelling to New Zealand as a gold prospector and to Australia as a sheep farmer, before returning to Edinburgh where he died in 1895.

[7] In 1869, American explorer Charles Francis Hall was taken by local Inuit to a shallow grave on King William Island containing well-preserved skeletal remains and fragments of clothing.

[12] A subsequent examination in 2009 of the "well-preserved and fairly complete skeleton of a young adult male of European ancestry"[14] included a facial reconstruction that showed "excellence of fit" with the face of Harry Goodsir, as portrayed in his 1845 daguerreotype.

[17] Harry Goodsir appears as a character in the 2007 novel The Terror by Dan Simmons, a fictionalized account of Franklin's lost expedition, as well as the 2018 television adaptation, where he is portrayed by Paul Ready.