John Lizars was a Scottish

Scotland

Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

 surgeon and anatomist.

Educated at the Royal High School

Royal High School (Edinburgh)

The Royal High School of Edinburgh is a co-educational state school administered by the City of Edinburgh Council. The school was founded in 1128 and is one of the oldest schools in Scotland, and has, throughout its history, been high achieving, consistently attaining well above average exam results...

 and the University of Edinburgh

University of Edinburgh

The University of Edinburgh, founded in 1583, is a public research university located in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The university is deeply embedded in the fabric of the city, with many of the buildings in the historic Old Town belonging to the university...

, he worked as a naval surgeon under Admiral Sir Charles Napier, seeing action in the Peninsular Wars.

He was professor of surgery at Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh

Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh

The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh is an organisation dedicated to the pursuit of excellence and advancement in surgical practice, through its interest in education, training and examinations, its liaison with external medical bodies and representation of the modern surgical workforce...

 and senior surgeon at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh. He performed the first ovariotomy in Britain in 1825. One of his pupils was Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin

Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...

.

Besides authoring an early work on the dangers of tobacco

Tobacco

Tobacco is an agricultural product processed from the leaves of plants in the genus Nicotiana. It can be consumed, used as a pesticide and, in the form of nicotine tartrate, used in some medicines...

, The Use and Abuse of Tobacco, Lizars published a number of important and beautifully illustrated anatomical texts in the early nineteenth century.