Thomas Addison

Thomas Addison (1795 to 1860) was an English physician and medical researcher who spent his career at Guy's Hospital in London, where he became a full physician in 1837 and a respected lecturer and diagnostician. Born in Long Benton near Newcastle upon Tyne, he took his medical degree at the University of Edinburgh in 1815 and joined Guy's as a pupil in 1817. He also worked under the dermatologist Thomas Bateman and developed a special interest in skin diseases. His name is attached to the adrenal disease he described in an 1855 publication on the suprarenal capsules, and to pernicious anemia, which he had observed in 1849 and which was later traced to a failure to absorb vitamin B12. He also gave one of the first adequate accounts of appendicitis, in 1839. He suffered recurring depression and died by suicide in 1860.