Addison's Disease Network

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Thomas Addison, 1795-1870

Thomas Addison was born to Sarah and Joseph Addison in October 1795 at Long Benton, Northumberland.

He was educated at the Royal Free Grammar School in Newcastle upon Tyne, where he learnt to write and speak fluent Latin. Despite his father's wishes for him to enter the legal profession, he chose medicine and in 1812 started at the University of Edinburgh as a medical student, graduating in 1815.

Thomas Addison became house surgeon at the Lock Hospital in London towards the end of 1815, and started practice. He soon became interested in diseases of the skin, the interest which followed him all his life and which was probably responsible for him being the first to describe the skin pigmentation changes typical of the condition we now know as Addison's disease.

On December 13th 1817 Addison enrolled as a physician pupil at Guys Hospital Medical School in London, as a result of which he became a licentiate in the Royal College of Physicians in December 1819. Promotion followed, firstly to assistant physician in 1824, and to lecturer in materia medica in 1827 at which he proved exceptionally popular.
He became a joint lecturer, with Richard Bright, on practical medicine in 1835, becoming full physician at Guys Hospital in 1837. He attained fellowship, by election, of the Royal College of Physicians on 4th July 1838, before finally becoming the sole lecturer in 1840 on the retirement of Richard Bright.

Thomas Addison first described the disease which now bears his name in an article in the London Medical Gazette, entitled "Disease: Chronic Suprarenal Insufficiency, Usually due to Tuberculosis of Suprarenal Capsule." (London Medical Gazette, 1849, 43: 517-518.) He published a follow-up monograph in London in 1855, which has been regarded as a beginning of the study of the endocrine system.

Although much discussion went on about Addison's work on the adrenal glands, other specialists of the time could not agree about the existence of the condition until an eminent French physician, Armand Trousseau, finally recognised adrenal failure. It was he who first called it Addison's disease.
Thomas Addison himself pointed out that it was only when he was examining cases of pernicious anaemia, for which he is also famous in discovering and is often called Addisonian PA, that he happened to find pathological conditions affecting the suprarenal glands (adrenal glands).
He initially thought that the two conditions were connected, but eventually maintained that they were distinct entities. [We now know, of course, that the main cause of Addison's disease in the present-day is autoimmune, as is pernicious anaemia, and in this context they are related as Addison first thought, although not two aspects of the same condition.]
Quite possibly Addison considered the two conditions were closely related, if not the same, because both conditions can cause change in skin colouration; advanced PA causing a lemon tinge to the skin, whereas that caused by Addison's Disease is often referred to as 'inappropriate tanning'.
Thomas Addison is said to have lectured on what we now know as pernicious anaemia as early as 1843 when he referred to it as "this remarkable form of anaemia" but it was not until 1849, the same year in which he published his article on Chronic Suprarenal Insufficiency (see above) that he first described pernicious anaemia in detail in a lecture to the South London Medical Society; however he apparently did not publish this in the ordinary way.

In London in 1855 Addison eventually published his book entitled "On the Constitutional and Local Effects of Disease of the Suprarenal Capsules" in which he describes for the first-time both Addison's disease and pernicious anaemia.
This book has been described as one of a truly remarkable medical books of the 19th century.

In 1847, aged 52, Addison married Elizabeth Hauxwell. Over the next few years he suffered a number of bouts of severe depression, as a result of which he eventually retired in 1860.

Three months later, on the 19th June 1860, he committed suicide by jumping off a parapet, a height of a mere nine feet.

Dr Thomas Addison died as result of the fractured skull received in the fall, ten days later, on 29th June 1860 at 15 Wellington Villas, Brighton.