After graduating with Honours in Classics at the University of St Andrews, served in World War II as an anti-aircraft gunnery officer in London and elsewhere. Then trained in medicine at the University of Oxford. Spent some nine years in general practice. Then some 15 years as a physiologist at the University of Edinburgh, during which he returned for some years to his original alma mater, St Andrews, as an external examiner, but in Physiology, not in Classics. Then some 11 years in medical administration and editorial work at the Scottish Department of Home & Health--after a career displaying either flexibility or indecision, according to one's prejudice.

Publications in the history of medicine and medical science include:

• "An experiment of Galen's repeated." Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 1954, 47: 241-44.
• "Lydgate's [medical] research project in 'Middlemarch'." The George Eliot--George Henry Lewes Newsletter, September 1990: 1-5.
• "The Homoeomerous Parts and their replacement by Bichat's Tissues." Medical History, 1995, 39: 477-492.
• "Postal diagnosis: breaking the bad news in the 17th century." British Medical Journal, 1995, 311: 1694-96.
• "Tobias Smollett consults a French physician in 1763." Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 1999, 92: 258-63.
• "The origins and fate of James Currie's cold water treatment for fever." Medical History, 2000, 44: 57-74.
• "The Marvellous Network and the History of Enquiry into its Function". Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 2002, 57: 198-217.

• "The Physiologia of Jean Fernel (1542) translated by John Forrester and with an introduction by John Henry and John Forrester." American Philosophcal Society.