Thomas Forrest Cotton

Thomas Forrest Cotton FRCP (4 November 1884 – 26 July 1965) was a Canadian cardiologist. He introduced electrocardiography to Canada and England and was the first to recognise the relationship between finger clubbing in adults with acquired structural heart disease and infective endocarditis. His paper on clubbing in endocarditis is considered by cardiologists as a classic.

Early life and family Thomas Cotton was born on 4 November 1884 in Cowansville, Quebec, to Cedric and Harriet C. Cotton. Cedric was a small-town physician. After completing his early medical education at McGill University, Cotton travelled to Europe to do house jobs. There, he worked with the big names of the time, Friedrich Kraus and Georg Nicolai, co-authors of the first textbook of electrocardiography, and later, with Friedrich von Muller in Munich and Karel Wenckebach in Vienna. He then spent a short time in postgraduate training in the United States before moving to University College Hospital, London, in 1913, where he worked with Sir Thomas Lewis.

Cotton briefly returned to Montreal General Hospital, where, in 1913, with the assistance of Osler's influence and financial contributions, Cotton was able to persuade the hospital to purchase an electrocardiograph. Cotton, as a result, became Canada's first electrocardiographer.

In 1922, he was one of four men who founded the Cardiac Club in London. Some of his archives are held at McGill University in the Osler Library of the History of Medicine