Genus Russelia
Pictures from Observations
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For Alexander Russell (c 1715–1768), British physician and traveller. He qualified as a doctor at Edinburgh University (1732–1734) and worked in Aleppo, Syria, from 1740–1754 as appointed physician to the English factory, and soon became the principal practitioner in the city. He witnessed the outbreaks of the plague between 1742 and 1744, and the resultant collapse of the Syrian economy in the 1750s. He recorded the plague’s progress in his diary, and an account of this is given in his Natural History of Aleppo (1756). In 1759, a vacancy occurred in St Thomas’s Hospital, London, and Russell was elected physician to that institution, an office he held until his death. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the Medical Society of London, to which he contributed several papers.