Born in London, he was educated at
Mount Radford School in
Exeter, and being destined for the medical profession he entered an apprenticeship with Mr Sedgwick, a surgeon in
Maidstone. In 1833 he began his studies at
Edinburgh, and in 1837 graduated with the highest honours and a gold medal, with a dissertation entitled
The Physiology and Pathology of the Brain. During his last year at Edinburgh he was elected President of the
Royal Medical Society,
Royal Physical Society of Edinburgh, and a vice-president of the
Anatomical and Physiological Society. During the next two years he studied in Paris (where he founded the English-speaking Medical Society) and then spent two in Germany (mainly at Heidelberg and the
Charité Hospital in Berlin), before returning to Edinburgh in 1841 where he published a
Treatise on Cod-liver Oil as a Therapeutic Agent. In the same year he began to lecture as an extra-academical teacher on
histology, drawing attention to the importance of the
microscope in the investigation of disease; and as physician to the
Royal Public Dispensary of Edinburgh he instituted courses of polyclinical medicine. In 1843 he was elected a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Edinburgh his proposer being Sir
Robert Christison. His address was then listed as 1 Glenfinlas Street, just off
Charlotte Square. In the same year he was appointed professor of the Institutes of Medicine at Edinburgh, and performed the duties of that chair with great energy until incapacitated by failing health, in 1874. In 1844 Bennett was elected a member of the
Harveian Society of Edinburgh and was one of its secretaries from 1849 to 1858. He served as President in 1859. In 1845, Bennett published a paper entitled a
Case of Hypertrophy of the Spleen and Liver in which Death Took Place from Suppuration of the Blood, the first recorded case of
leukemia, then known as
leucocythemia, in the
Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal. In 1849, Bennett was elected as a member to the
American Philosophical Society. In 1855 he was a prime opponent of
Thomas Laycock for the Edinburgh Chair. His obituary refers to this as an "exciting contest". Michalel Barfoot wrote in 1995 that 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 (by Laycock) 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". In 1873, he was elected a member of the
French Academy of Medicine and granted recognition by the French government to practice medicine in France. In August 1875 he was able to be present at the meeting of the
British Medical Association in Edinburgh, on which occasion he received the degree of LL.D., but the fatigue he then underwent brought on a relapse, and he was compelled to have the operation of
lithotomy performed. He sank rapidly and died on 25 September 1875 at
Norwich. , 1875,
Old College, University of Edinburgh Bennett died at
Norwich on 25 September 1875, nine days after an operation for stone, performed by Mr. Cadge, from which his enfeebled strength did not enable him to recover. He was buried in the
Dean Cemetery, Edinburgh, on 30 September by the side of his friends Goodsir and Edward Forbes. ==Works==