John Cheyne (physician)

John Cheyne was a British physician and surgeon, born at Leith, Edinburgh, in 1777 and dead at Sherington, Buckinghamshire, in 1836. The son of a surgeon, he entered Edinburgh University at fifteen, graduated as a doctor at eighteen and served as an army surgeon, including at the Battle of Vinegar Hill, before moving to Dublin about 1809. He worked at the Meath Hospital, became Professor of Medicine in the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland in 1813, and in 1820 was appointed Physician General to British forces in Ireland. He wrote monographs on diseases of children, on the membrane of the larynx and bronchia, on apoplexy and lethargy, and with Francis Barker on fever epidemics in Ireland. He is remembered as one of those who identified the pattern of periodic breathing named Cheyne-Stokes respiration.