Francis Home

Francis Home was a Scottish physician of the Enlightenment, born in 1719 at Eccles in Berwickshire. After an apprenticeship to an Edinburgh surgeon he served as a regimental surgeon in Flanders, studied at Leiden, and took his medical degree at Edinburgh in 1750 with a treatise on intermittent fever. In 1768 he became the first Professor of Materia Medica at the University of Edinburgh, a post he held until 1798, and he used his clinical teaching at the Royal Infirmary to test the actions of several new drugs. He made the first recorded attempt to vaccinate against measles in 1758, and his 1765 inquiry on croup treated it as a distinct disease tied to changes in the larynx and trachea. He also wrote on bleaching and on agricultural chemistry, helped found the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1783, and served as president of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. He died in 1813.