Life
His father Alexander Thomson was Postmaster-General, a member of the council of the Province of Georgia, and custom-collector for Savannah, Georgia. He was born in Edinburgh where his parents were staying temporarily, went to America but along with other loyalists returned to Britain after the result of the American War of Independence returned to Edinburgh.
In 1828 he became the first professor of materia medica and therapeutics at London University (now University College London). In 1832, on the death of John Gordon Smith, he was appointed joint professor of medical jurisprudence with Andrew Amos. In 1837 Amos was appointed a member of the governor-general's council in India and so Thomson became sole professor.
He married twice. In 1801 he married Christina Maxwell, and they had one son and two daughters, but she died in 1820. In 1820 he married Katherine Byerley, daughter of Thomas Byerley and they had three sons and five daughters. His daughter from this second marriage Elizabeth was the mother of Rennell Rodd, 1st Baron Rennell.
Read more about this topic: Anthony Todd Thomson
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
“The future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium. What a very few are acquiring in knowledge of the physical world will perhaps cause this period not to be judged as a pure return of barbarism.”
—Primo Levi (1919–1987)
“The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)