Colin Chisholm (medical writer)

Colin Chisholm (1755 to 1825) was a Scottish surgeon and medical writer who spent much of his career in the British West Indies. He served as a military surgeon to British forces in the American War of Independence, then moved to Grenada in 1783 at the invitation of John Rollo. He later bought a cotton plantation in Demerara, where he learned of an eye remedy made from a Bignonia root used by the Arawak people. Aberdeen awarded him an M.D. in 1793, and in 1795 he became surgeon-general to the ordnance; he reached the rank of inspector-general of hospitals after serving on Ralph Abercromby's expedition in the Virgin Islands. His best known work, An Essay on the Malignant Pestilential Fever (1795), argued that the epidemic in Grenada was contagious, a contested view, and the later term Bulam fever grew out of the debate; he also wrote A Manual of the Climate and Diseases of Tropical Countries (1822). He practised in Bristol, became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1808 and died in London in 1825.