Matthew John Tierney

Sir Matthew John Tierney (1776 to 1845), 1st Baronet, was an Irish surgeon and physician who became physician in ordinary to Kings George IV and William IV. The eldest son of a family from County Limerick, he began his medical education at the United Borough hospitals in London and in 1798 was appointed surgeon to the Earl of Berkeley's militia regiment. That year he met the smallpox vaccine pioneer Edward Jenner in Gloucestershire, and he went on to study at Edinburgh and Glasgow, where he took up the study of vaccination. He graduated doctor of medicine at Glasgow in 1802 with an inaugural essay on cowpox, settled as a physician in Brighton and helped form a vaccine institution there, the first established outside London. He became physician to the household of the Prince of Wales, the future George IV, was created a baronet in 1818, and in 1840 published Observations on Variola Vaccina, or Cow Pock.