Thomas Trotter (physician)

Thomas Trotter (1760 to 1832) was a Scottish naval physician and author, born in Melrose, Roxburghshire, who became one of the leading medical reformers of the Royal Navy and an outspoken critic of the slave trade. He entered the navy as a surgeon's mate at nineteen, later served as surgeon aboard a slaving ship, an experience that turned him against the trade, and took his M.D. at Edinburgh in 1788 after studying under Alexander Monro secundus. As physician to the Channel fleet and the Navy's Physician of the Fleet he required naval surgeons and their assistants to be inoculated against smallpox, and his Medicina Nautica of 1802 gave a detailed account of naval medicine during the French Revolutionary Wars. He is also remembered in the history of alcohol addiction for describing habitual drinking as a disease of the mind. He died at Newcastle upon Tyne in 1832.