John Rutherford Ryley

John Rutherford Ryley (1837 – 3 March 1884) was an Australian surgeon who studied medicine in Glasgow, where he learned about Listerian antisepsis from Joseph Lister.

[5] In January 1868, while working at Hokitika Hospital, Ryley successfully used Lister's newly described method of antisepsis in three cases and published the results.

He was eager to try Lister's method, particularly because "the last two cases of compound fracture treated in an ordinary way in the Hospital over which I preside had terminated fatally".

[12][13] He also corresponded with Sir Joseph Fayrer, an authority on enteric disease, and published a paper suggesting that the cause of typhoid fever in Westland, New Zealand was the water drunk by the miners.

[15] He traveled to Levuka, Fiji in 1870 and there, in addition to medical practice, he became a member of the Fijian Parliament but resigned his seat after less than a year for "personal reasons".

in Pennsylvania and later that year he served in South Africa as a civilian surgeon attached to a field hospital during the Zulu War.

He practised in New South Wales, in a series of hospital posts successively at Temora, Tenterfield, Gulgong and then as a partner in practice at Mudgee.

At discharge on 26 March 1870, the asylum doctor declared that "longer incarceration would be likely to convert a case of slight mental irritability into confirmed lunacy.

[18] There he swallowed a mixture of morphia with prussic acid and was transferred to the Sydney Hospital where he was certified as "insane" and died the next day.