James Copland (physician)

He went to London, but finding no work that suited him, after eighteen months, he took a post in the Gold Coast as medical officer to the settlements of the African Company.

[1] Copland landed at Goree, Senegal, and later in The Gambia, and Sierra Leone, studying the tropical diseases.

On leaving Sierra Leone, three-quarters of the ship's crew went down with fever; and a gale carried away the masts.

Copland was president of the Pathological Society, but without the respect of some of the practical morbid anatomists who attended its meetings.

He began by writing on the medical topography of West Africa (Quarterly Journal of Foreign Medicine, 1820), on human rumination, on yellow fever, on hydrophobia, on cholera (London Medical Repository, 1821), and then engaged in a discussion (London Medical and Physical Journal) on chronic peritonitis (the question disputed was how to determine whether such cases were due to tubercle or merely to chronic inflammation).

The work, as the Dictionary of Practical Medicine, was ultimately finished by Copland in three volumes, with double columns, on 3,509 closely printed pages.

[11] In 1825 he published notes to the De Lys translation of Anthelme Richerand's Elements of Physiology.

[13] Writing later in "Insanity" in the Dictionary, Copland noted that he had undergone a phrenological reading and thought little of it.

[1] Copland was a supporter of contingent contagionism, an attempted compromise between the view that cholera was a contagious disease, and its outright opponents.