Background
William Gregory was born on December 25, 1803, in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was the fourth son of James Gregory, professor of medicine at the University of Edinburgh, and Isabella MacLeod.
University of Edinburgh, Old College, South Bridge, Edinburgh EH8 9YL, United Kingdom
William was educated for the medical profession and graduated in 1828 from the University of Edinburgh.
Ludwigstraße 23, 35390 Gießen, Germany
William studied at the University of Giessen.
United Kingdom
In 1832 Gregory was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
chemist educator physician scientist
William Gregory was born on December 25, 1803, in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was the fourth son of James Gregory, professor of medicine at the University of Edinburgh, and Isabella MacLeod.
William was educated for the medical profession and graduated in 1828 from the University of Edinburgh. After graduation, he chose to pursue his interest in chemistry rather than practice medicine and continued studying at the University of Giessen.
William made extended visits to the Continent and worked as an assistant to several chemists, most notably Justus Liebig at his Giessen laboratory in 1835. There he developed a primary interest in organic chemistry. Following his work with Liebig, Gregory returned to Edinburgh where he gave public lectures in chemistry.
In 1837 Gregory accepted a lectureship at Anderson College in Glasgow and the next year at a Dublin medical school. Gregory was appointed a professor of chemistry at King’s College, Aberdeen, in 1839 and remained there, except for an additional year of study with Liebig in 1841, until 1844. He returned to the University of Edinburgh in 1844 and held the chair of chemistry until his death.
William Gregory is important to the development of chemistry primarily because of his translations into English of the many works of Liebig on organic, agricultural, and physiological chemistry. His own research was devoted chiefly to organic chemistry, especially the separation and analysis of natural products. Gregory investigated the preparation of morphine and codeine from opium and was the first to describe the preparation of isoprene from crude rubber. He also wrote several successful chemical textbooks, including Outlines of Chemistry and Letters to a Candid Inquirer on Animal Magnetism.
In 1846 Gregory abstracted for a British journal the studies which Karl von Reichenbach had performed in 1845 on animal magnetism. Gregory later translated and published, with a twenty-seven-page preface of his own, Reichenbach’s Researches on Magnetism, Electricity, Heat, Light, Crystallization, and Chemical Attraction, in Their Relations to the Vital Force. Criticized for both the abstract and the translation of Reichenbach’s work, Gregory further incurred the disapproval of his colleagues at the University of Edinburgh with his publication of Letters To a Candid Inquirer on Animal Magnetism. In this work, he attempted to establish a scientific basis for phenomena such as clairvoyance, thought transference, and unusual sensitivity of subjects who were under the influence of hypnotism. Following Reichenbach, he attributed most of these cases to emanations of a physical fluid, called odyl. His work on animal magnetism went through four editions during the nineteenth century. In addition, he published many pamphlets and papers on this subject. During the last ten years of his life, Gregory also became interested in the study of diatoms, on which he wrote twelve papers.
In 1832 Gregory was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Physical Characteristics: Gregory suffered from poor health most of his life.