William Rutherford (physiologist)

William Rutherford FRSE FRS FRCPE[1] (20 April 1839, Ancrum Craig, Roxburghshire – 21 February 1899, 14 Douglas Crescent, Edinburgh) was a Scottish physician and physiologist.

He was educated at Jedburgh Grammar School then studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, gaining his doctorate (MD) in 1863.

[2] After studying in Berlin, Vienna, and Paris, he became assistant to John Hughes Bennett, professor of physiology at the University of Edinburgh.

After the Edinburgh anatomist John Goodsir told Bennett about the new experimental physiology in Germany, William Rutherford and the ophthalmologist Douglas Argyll Robertson became the first in the United Kingdom to instruct students in the use of the apparatus of Hermann von Helmholtz, Emil du Bois-Reymond and Carl Ludwig.

[7] Rutherford lectured at the University of Edinburgh when Arthur Conan Doyle studied medicine there.