Thomas Addison

Thomas Addison (born April 1793, Longbenton, Northumberland, Eng.—died June 29, 1860, Bristol, Gloucestershire) was an English physician after whom Addison’s disease, a metabolic dysfunction caused by atrophy of the adrenal cortex, and Addison’s (pernicious) anemia were named. He was the first to correlate a set of disease symptoms with pathological changes in one of the endocrine glands.

In 1837 Addison became a full physician at Guy’s Hospital, London, and a joint lecturer on medicine with Richard Bright, with whom he wrote Elements of the Practice of Medicine (1839). He gave a preliminary account in 1849 of the two diseases named after him and in 1855 wrote On the Constitutional and Local Effects of Disease of the Supra-Renal Capsules. He was author, with John Morgan, of An Essay on the Operation of Poisonous Agents upon the Living Body (1829), the first English book on the subject.