Thomas Inman

Thomas Inman was a Liverpool physician, born in Leicester on 27 January 1820 and died near Bristol on 3 May 1876. He was the second son of Charles Inman, a partner in the Pickfords carrying company. He was apprenticed in 1836 to his uncle, a physician at Preston, studied at King's College, London, and took his M.B. in 1842 and his M.D. in 1844 at the University of London. He declined an army surgeon's commission, settled in Liverpool as house-surgeon to the Royal Infirmary and built a good practice, serving for many years as physician to the Infirmary. His medical writings included works on spontaneous combustion, on painful muscular affections and myalgia, on spinal irritation, on the preservation and restoration of health and a proposed new theory and practice of medicine. He was also an amateur mythologist, best known for Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism, which traced the origins of common symbols, some of them medical. He retired to Clifton in 1871.