Thomas Trotter (physician)

Thomas Trotter (1760 – 1832) was a Scottish naval physician and author who was a leading medical reformer in the Royal Navy and an ardent critic of the slave trade. Trotter was born in Melrose, Roxburghshire, and studied medicine under Alexander Monro (secundus) in Edinburgh. His major work, the Medicina Nautica, was published in 1802 and provides a detailed examination of the state of naval medicine during the French Revolutionary Wars.

Trotter was a champion of vaccinations for naval medical staff, and as the Navy's Physician of the Fleet he required that all naval surgeons and assistants be inoculated against smallpox. Influenced by his career in the Royal Navy, Trotter was also a key figure in the development of modern theories of alcohol addiction, describing habitual alcohol consumption as a 'disease of the mind'. After an extensive naval career, Trotter retired to private practice in 1802 and died in 1832.