John William Polidori

John William Polidori (1795–1821) was an English physician and writer, the son of an Italian scholar and the uncle of Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti. He took his medical degree at Edinburgh at nineteen and in 1816 was engaged as personal physician to Lord Byron on his journey into exile, keeping a diary of the summer at the Villa Diodati with Shelley and Mary Godwin that is a principal source for the circle. Dismissed by Byron, he wrote The Vampyre from a fragment his employer had abandoned, and it was published in 1819 under Byron's name. He died in London at twenty-five, probably by his own hand.