John Hughes Bennett

Who was John Hughes Bennett?

John Hughes Bennett was an English physician, physiologist and pathologist. His main contribution to medicine has been the first description of leukemia as a blood disorder. The first person to describe leukemia as an unknown disease was Alfred François Donné.

Bennett was the first doctor to describe aspergillosis. In his seminal paper published in 1842 entitled "On the parasitic vegetable structures found growing in living animals" he makes the very first description of aspergillus growing in the lung tissue of humans.

In 1855 he was a prime opponent of Thomas Laycock for the Edinburgh Chair. His obituary refers to this as an "exciting contest". It was in fact extremely bitter, and became a source of great dissension in subsequent years. Barfoot describes him as having "the personality biographers' dreams are made of", and quotes Bennett's biographer John M'Kendrick as stating that Bennett "regarded his defeat as the great disappointment of his life, and there is little doubt that it tended to a certain extent to distort his views of men an things".