He was educated at Rugby School before spending time in the British Army's medical department, becoming surgeon's mate in June 1794.
He then took his medical degree at Peterhouse and Gonville and Caius College at the University of Cambridge,[2] along with London lectures from George Fordyce and Andrew Marshal and time in Edinburgh, finally graduating MD in 1803.
October 1795 saw him made physician to the forces, accompanying Admiral Christian's fleet to Santo Domingo and being sent to Gibraltar in 1804 to treat a contagious fever outbreak there.
In April 1806 he came back to England, where in 1809 George III knighted him and appointed him chief of the medical department of the army at Cádiz, then in the midst of the Peninsular War.
In 1816, he married Elizabeth, the eldest daughter of Joseph James, of Adbury House, Hampshire, and sister-in-law to the geologist William Henry Fitton.