English physician and experimental physiologist, 1732–1784
Matthew Dobson (1732–1784) was an English physician and experimental
physiologist. He is now remembered for his work on
diabetes.[1][2]
Life and career
His parents were Joshua Dobson, a nonconformist minister at Lydgate,
West Yorkshire, and Elizabeth, daughter of Matthew Smith who was minister at
Mixenden. He matriculated at
Glasgow University in 1750, where he graduated MA in 1753. He then moved to
Edinburgh University, where he graduated MD in 1756. From the end of the decade he worked as a doctor in
Liverpool.[1][3]
Dobson worked with
Matthew Turner and others to set up the Liverpool Academy of Art in 1769, a local reply to the
Royal Academy's foundation in 1768. After a slow start, a first exhibition was held in 1774.[4] (The 1810 foundation of the
Liverpool Academy of Arts was in the nature of a fresh beginning.)[5] In 1770 he was appointed physician to
Liverpool Infirmary, as successor to John Kennion.[1] He had a house in Harrington Street. When
William Enfield wrote his History of Leverpool [sic] (1772), Dobson contributed to it.[6]
Dobson was physician, and eventually confidant to
Hester Thrale.[10] He played a key role in her second marriage to Gabriel Piozzi, persuading her daughter
Queeney to accept Piozzi, whose banishment from the household he said was life-threatening for her mother.[11]
Dobson died in Bath on 25 July 1784, incidentally on the day of Hester Thrale's second marriage,[12] and was buried at
Walcot.[1] A memorial was put up in
Toxteth Park chapel.[6]
Study group
Dobson was part of a medical study group for his local area that met on a quarterly basis.
John Aikin of Chester and Warrington took part, with
John Bostock,
Thomas Percival and
John Haygarth.[13] Dobson provided information on
influenza in Liverpool for the researches of Haygarth, a classmate from Edinburgh.[14][15]
This group was closely associated with
Joseph Priestley,
Richard Price and radical politics.[16] It also cooperated as part of Priestley's attempt to develop "pneumatic therapy": the medical use of newly isolated gases.[17]
Medical work
In his student days, Dobson worked with
William Cullen at
Glasgow University on
evaporation.[9] In 1775 Dobson for the first time identified as a sugar the sweet substance in the
urine of patients with
diabetes. He published his work as Experiments and Observations on the Urine in Diabetics (1776).[18][19] It did not have a major clinical impact, the findings being still debated until the work of
George Owen Rees in the middle of the 19th century.[20] Dobson observed the sweet taste of the blood of diabetics (caused by
hyperglycemia), and argued that the disease was not located in the
kidneys, as was believed at the time. Initial use of specialised diets by physicians was not very successful.[21]John Rollo cited Dobson in his research of the late 1790s, and established principles for a
diabetic diet.[1]
In 1779 Dobson reported success in using "fixed air" (
carbon dioxide) in the treatment of
scurvy.[25] That year he published Medical Commentary on Fixed Air. The 1787 edition had an appendix by
William Falconer.[26] The work also advocated fixed air as a treatment for
the stone.[27] Dobson was interested in
bladder stones from a statistical point of view, too, and gathered data from
Norwich Hospital.[28] In fact he made a wider survey of hospitals and their admissions in the 1779 edition, Norwich having the highest proportion of admitted patients for bladder stone. The figures were reprinted by
Leonhard Ludwig Finke during the 1790s.[29]
Family
In 1759 Dobson married
Susannah Dobson (née Dawson), a translator from French. They had three children, at least two of whom were baptised at the
Octagon Chapel, Liverpool. Dobson was an associate of
Thomas Bentley in the construction of the chapel; and
Nicholas Clayton, a classmate from Glasgow, was the first minister.[1]
^Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire (1853).
Proceedings and Papers. Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire. pp.
71–2. Retrieved 19 June 2013.
^
abJames Allanson Picton, Memorials of Liverpool: historical and topographical, including a history of the Dock Estate vol. 2 (1875), pp. 132–133;
archive.org.
^DeLacy, Margaret (1993). "Influenza Research and the Medical Profession in Eighteenth-Century Britain". Albion. 25 (1): 37–66.
doi:
10.2307/4051039.
JSTOR4051039.
^Dobson, Matthew (1775). "Experiments in an Heated Room. By Matthew Dobson, M. D. In a Letter to John Fothergill, M. D. F. R. S.". Philosophical Transactions. 65: 463–469.
Bibcode:
1775RSPT...65..463D.
JSTOR106216.