Robert Willis (physician)

Robert Willis (1799 – 21 September 1878) was a Scottish physician, librarian, and medical historian.

He was educated at the High School of Edinburgh, where he formed a lifelong friendship with his contemporary James Syme, who would become a surgeon and marry Willis's sister.

[1] Willis is remembered for his scholarly translation from Latin of the complete works of William Harvey, published by the Sydenham Society in 1847 (Sykes, 2001).

This is for instance the case in Robert Beyer's Sounds of Our Times: Two Hundred Years of Acoustics (1998).

Sometimes, it is the other way round: Thierry Mandoul's Entre raison et utopie: l'Histoire de l'architecture d'Auguste Choisy (2008) erroneously gives the dates 1799–1878 for the Willis who worked in architecture.