Robert Ellis Dudgeon

Robert Ellis Dudgeon (17 March 1820 – 8 September 1904) was a Scottish homeopath.

Life Born at Leith on 17 March 1820, Dudgeon was a younger son of a timber merchant and shipowner there. After attending a private school he received his medical education at Edinburgh, partly in the university and partly in the extra-academical medical school.

Having received the licence of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in 1839, he attended lectures in Paris, by Velpeau, Andral, Louis, and others. He graduated M.D. at Edinburgh on 1 August 1841, and spent a semester at Vienna under Škoda, Rokitansky, Hebra, and Jäger. At Vienna fellow students John Drysdale and Rutherfurd Russell paid attention to fashionable homœopathic practice, developed by Samuel Hahnemann some forty years before; but Dudgeon was not at the time attracted by Hahnemann's system. From Vienna he went to Berlin to study diseases of the eye under Jüngken, of the ear under Kramer, and organic chemistry under Simon. He also went to Dublin to hear Dominic Corrigan, Robert James Graves, Henry Marsh and William Stokes. Dudgeon lectured in the school on the theory and practice of homœopathy and published his lectures in 1854. Dudgeon was for a short time assistant physician there. He was secretary of the British Homœopathic Society in 1848, vice-president in 1874–75, and president in 1878 and 1890. he made a pocket instrument for registering the pulse. He published an account of it in The Sphygmograph: its history and use as an aid to diagnosis in ordinary practice (1882), The approach was later adapted, and integrated with a recorder, by Sir James Mackenzie.

A utopian science fiction novel, Colymbia (1873), was a response to Erewhon of the previous year: Samuel Butler was a patient and friend.

Family Dudgeon was twice married, and had a family of two sons and three daughters.