Richard Morton (physician)

Richard Morton (1637 to 1698) was an English physician who wrote one of the first major studies of consumption, the wasting lung disease now called tuberculosis. Born in Worcestershire and trained at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, he first entered the church and became vicar of Kinver in Staffordshire, but resigned after refusing to conform to the Act of Uniformity of 1662. He took an Oxford doctorate in medicine in 1670, became a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1678 and served as physician in ordinary to William III. His Phthisiologia of 1689 was the first work to say that tubercles are always present in the lung disease, though like his contemporaries he took them for degenerated glands, since the bacillus was not identified until Robert Koch in 1882. He also wrote on fevers, and his essay on nervous consumption holds the first recognized medical descriptions of what is now called anorexia nervosa.