While a medical student in Edinburgh he took charge of a Unitarian congregation. In 1816 he took his M.D. degree, and began to practice at Yeovil, Somerset, also becoming minister at a chapel in that town, but removed in 1820 to London, devoting himself principally to medicine.
In 1824 he was appointed physician to the London Fever Hospital, and in 1830 published A Treatise on Fever, which was at once accepted as a standard authority on the subject. In this book he established the direct connection between the impoverishment of the poor and epidemic fever. He was frequently consulted in fever epidemics and on sanitary matters by public authorities, and his reports on quarantine (1845), cholera (1850), yellow fever (1852), and on the results of sanitary improvement (1854) were of international importance. He died in Florence.
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