WRIGHT, WILLIAM (1735–1819), physician and botanist, was born at Crieff, Perthshire, in March 1735. He went to Crieff grammar school, and when seventeen was apprenticed to George Dennistoun, a surgeon at Falkirk. In 1756 he entered the university of Edinburgh, living with his uncle, and in 1757 he made a voyage to Greenland as surgeon on a whaler. In January 1758 he presented himself at Surgeons' Hall for examination, and was appointed second surgeon's mate on board the Intrepid. He began a careful study of scurvy, attributing it mainly to dirt, drink, and bad food. He was present on 4 April 1758 at Sir Edward Hawke's engagement at Rhé; shared at Gibraltar in the prize-money of the Raisonnable, which Captain Pratten of the Intrepid captured on 26 April; and witnessed Boscawen's victory over De la Clue off Lagos on 16 Aug. 1759. The Intrepid returning to refit, Wright offered himself for re-examination, and was rated as first mate to the Danaë under Captain Sir Henry Martin. In 1760 she was ordered to the West Indies under Rodney. Wright was transferred in succession to the hospitals at Port Royal and St. Pierre, to the Culloden and to the Levant, and was then paid off in September 1763.
Though he now qualified as surgeon and graduated M.D. in absentiâ at St. Andrews, in default of employment he started in December 1764 for Jamaica, intending to commence private practice. Finding, however, too many doctors there before him, he was glad to become assistant to Dr. Gray. Six months later Thomas Steel, his former fellow-student, invited him to become his partner at Hampden, Trelawny, one hundred and fifty miles from Kingston. They lived together and invested their savings in negroes. In 1771 they built a new house named Orange Hill; and in that year Wright began his herbarium of Jamaica plants, verifying during his residence in the island seven hundred and sixty species, and attaching to them their vernacular names and references to the works of Sloane and Browne. He sent live plants to Kew and dried ones to Sir Joseph Banks [q. v.], Jonathan Stokes, and others, maintaining an extensive scientific correspondence with medical men and botanists both in Europe and America. In 1774 Wright was appointed honorary surgeon-general of Jamaica, and in the following year he made known the occurrence in Jamaica of a native species of cinchona, and published in the ‘Transactions’ of the Philosophical Society of Philadelphia his first paper, one on diabetes.
In August 1777 Wright embarked for England, but on the voyage caught a malignant fever from a seaman, and cured himself by douches of cold sea-water, a remedy which he had previously successfully employed in cases of tetanus. His priority in this cold-water treatment of fever was afterwards fully admitted by the London Medical Society. In London he stayed with Maxwell Garthshore [q. v.], the obstetrician, in St. Martin's Lane; studied, with William Aiton's assistance, at Kew; and enjoyed the weekly meetings with Banks, Daniel Charles Solander [q. v.], Fothergill, Pitcairn, and others, at the house of Sir John Pringle [q. v.] He eventually settled at his native place, where his brother James had at his request built him a house, in which they both lived, Wright adopting his nephew James and educating him for the medical profession. After a tour in the west of Scotland and a visit to Lord Buchan near Linlithgow, Wright went to Edinburgh and attended the lectures of Professors Black, Munro, and Cullen. He became an original member of the Philosophical Society (afterwards the Royal Society) of Edinburgh.
In 1779 Sir Joseph Banks procured for Wright the post of regimental surgeon to the Jamaica regiment. Wright on this became a licentiate of the Edinburgh College of Physicians, and embarked at Portsmouth with two companies of his regiment on the transport Morant, which sailed with fifty-four other unarmed vessels under the protection of the Ramilies, Thetis, and Southampton. The whole expedition fell into the hands of a French and Spanish fleet off Cape St. Vincent, during a fog, this being perhaps the greatest loss the mercantile navy of Britain had ever sustained. Wright, whose valuable hortus siccus was lost on this occasion, but who managed to secrete and destroy the colours of his regiment, was landed on parole at Cadiz on 3 Sept. by the French man-of-war the Bourgogne, and was marched to Arcos on the Guadalete in Andalusia. In a country where medicine was a century behindhand his skill soon gained him great repute, and he was even taken into convents to prescribe for sick nuns; but the corregidor of the inquisition, discovering that one of the British officers had a masonic apron, threatened general domiciliary visits, whereupon the Englishmen resolved to offer forcible resistance, and the Spanish authorities preferred to march them to the Guadiana and across the Portuguese frontier. Wright and some
