Chapter V: JAMES GREGORY (1753-1821), Scottish physician, eldest son of the

preceding, was born at Aberdeen in January 1753. He accompanied his father to Edinburgh in 1764, and after going through the usual course of literary studies at that university, he was for a short time a student at Christchurch, Oxford. It was there probably that he acquired that taste for classical learning which afterwards distinguished him. He studied medicine at Edinburgh, and, after graduating doctor of medicine in 1774, spent the greater part of the next two years in Holland, France and Italy. Shortly after his return to Scotland he was appointed in 1776 to the chair his father had formerly held, and in the following year he also entered on the duties of teacher of clinical medicine in the Royal Infirmary. On the illness of Dr William Cullen in 1790 he was appointed joint-professor of the practice of medicine, and he became the head of the Edinburgh Medical School on the death of Dr Cullen in the same year. He died on the 2nd of April 1821. As a medical practitioner Gregory was for the last ten years of his life at the head of the profession in Scotland. He was at one time president of the Edinburgh College of Physicians, but his indiscretion in publishing certain private proceedings of the college led to his suspension on the 13th of May 1809 from all rights and privileges which pertained to the fellowship.

Besides his _Conspectus medicinae theoreticae_, published in 1788 as a
text-book for his lectures on the institutes, Dr Gregory was the
author of "A Theory of the Moods of Verbs," published in the _Edin.
Phil. Trans._ (1787), and of _Literary and Philosophical Essays_,
published in two volumes in 1792.