James Drought (1738–1820) D.D., of Dublin and Park, "a member of one of the principal families of the King's County (Offaly)," whose mother was the sister of Theaker Wilder.

After a brilliant undergraduate career in the arts, he received a degree in medicine in 1818 and left for London to study surgery under Sir William Blizard.

Afterwards, he spent the following three years travelling the continent between stints as an observer at the medical schools of Edinburgh, Berlin, Vienna, Göttingen, Hamburg, Copenhagen and those of France and Italy.

During a gale the vessel sprang a leak, the pumps failed, and the crew attempted to abandon ship: Graves holed the one lifeboat with an axe, declaring to the crew, "let us all be drowned together, it is a pity to part good company", he then proceeded to repair the pumps with leather from his own shoes, so saving the ship and all aboard.

[2] Graves returned to Dublin in 1821, setting up his own medical practice and introducing new clinical methods that he had witnessed on his travels to the Meath Hospital and the Park Street School of Medicine which he helped found.

In his introductory lecture he said: "From the very commencement the student should set out to witness the progress and effects of sickness and ought to persevere in the daily observation of disease during the whole period of his studies".

He was appointed Professor to the Institutes of medicine in the Irish College of Physicians and wrote essays and gave lectures on physiological topics.

Among the innovations introduced in the lectures were the timing of the pulse by watch and the practicing of giving food and liquids to patients with fever instead of withholding nourishment.

In dealing with a colleague's attack on the use of the stethoscope (the instrument was advocated by himself and Stokes having been invented in France in 1816), he wrote: "We suspect Dr Clutterbuck's sense of hearing must be injured: for him the 'ear trumpet' magnifies but distorts sound, rendering it less distinct than before".

His lasting fame rests chiefly on his Clinical Lectures, which were a model for the day and recommended by none other than Armand Trousseau (1801–1867), who suggested the term Graves' disease.

Following his death, a Dublin watchmaking company began selling watches with second hands, a concept Graves had come up with for personal use but didn't patent.

[5] A collection of various of his papers, including a biography, was published by his friend and contemporary William Stokes as Studies in Physiology and Medicine, London, 1863.

German translation by Heiman Bressler (1805–1873): Klinische Erfahrungen aus dem Englischen von Robert Graves übersetzt.