Robley Dunglison

Life & Legacy

Robley Dunglison (4 January 1798 – 1 April 1869) was an English-American medical doctor, medical educator and writer who served as the first full-time professor of medicine in the United States at the newly founded University of Virginia from 1825 to 1833. He authored multiple medical textbooks and is considered the "Father of American Physiology" after the publication of his landmark textbook Human Physiology in 1832. He was the personal physician to Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe. He consulted in the treatment of Andrew Jackson and was in attendance at Jefferson's death.
He served as chair of materia medica, therapeutics, hygiene and medical jurisprudence at the University of Maryland School of Medicine from 1833 to 1836 and chair of the Institutes of Medicine and Medical Jurisprudence at Jefferson Medical College from 1836 to 1868. He assisted William Beaumont in some of his experiments on gastric digestion and published the first description of Huntington's disease in his textbook The Practice of Medicine in 1842.