1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Forbes, Sir John

FORBES, SIR JOHN (1787–1861), British physician, was born at Cuttlebrae, Banffshire, in 1787. He attended the grammar school at Aberdeen, and afterwards entered Marischal College. After serving for nine years as a surgeon in the navy, he graduated M.D. at Edinburgh in 1817, and then began to practise in Penzance, whence he removed to Chichester in 1822. He took up his residence in London in 1840, and in the following year was appointed physician to the royal household. He was knighted in 1853, and died on the 13th of November 1861 at Whitchurch in Berkshire. Sir John Forbes was better known as an author and editor than as a practical physician. His works include the following:—Original Cases ... illustrating the Use of the Stethoscope and Percussion in the Diagnosis of Diseases of the Chest (1824); Illustrations of Modern Mesmerism (1845); A Physician’s Holiday (1st ed., 1849); Memorandums made in Ireland in the Autumn of 1852 (2 vols., 1853); Sightseeing in Germany and the Tyrol in the Autumn of 1855 (1856). He was joint editor with A. Tweedie and J. Conolly of The Cyclopaedia of Practical Medicine (4 vols., 1833–1835); and in 1836 he founded the British and Foreign Medical Review, which, after a period of prosperity, involved its editor in pecuniary loss, and was discontinued in 1847, partly in consequence of the advocacy in its later numbers of doctrines obnoxious to the profession.