Edward Martin Greenhow

Born in 1760 (bapt 30 Dec) at Stirling, Scotland, where his father Michael was a junior officer in the garrison of Stirling Castle.

In 1775 Edward was apprenticed to John Leighton, Apothecary and Surgeon of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Thereafter he signed up as an Army (?Navy) surgeon, and served under General Eliott at Gibraltar during the Great Siege of 1779-83. Returning to England he established himself as a long-serving and much-respected doctor in North Shields. In 1795 he was practising as a surgeon apothecary (i.e. general practitioner) in North Shields, from where he advertised for an assistant (and also an apprentice) in the Newcastle Weekly Courant. In 1801 he was himself in turn master to an apprentice surgeon, John Child.

He married Mary Powditch at Christ Church, Tynemouth on 5 Sep 1786, and over the next two decades they had a large family - nine children were baptized at the same church between 1787 & 1809, of whom the brilliant hospital surgeon and sanitary reformer, Thomas Michael Greenhow (1792-1881), was the second son. The eldest son, Edward Woodward Greenhow (b.1787) was also a doctor, and took over the North Shields practice after his father's retirement.

Edward Martin Greenhow died at North Shields on 10th May 1835, "in the 75th year of his age".