Charles Creighton

Charles Creighton (1847–1927) was a Scottish physician and medical historian. Born in Peterhead and educated at Aberdeen and Edinburgh, he was demonstrator of anatomy at Cambridge and seemed destined for a distinguished academic career until his opposition to vaccination, expressed in an article for the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1888 and in later books, closed the profession to him. He then lived by his pen, translating Hirsch's handbook of historical and geographical pathology and writing A History of Epidemics in Britain (1891–94), a two-volume work of great learning that remains the standard account of its subject. He died in 1927 in relative obscurity.