In June 1832, the editor of the Lancet thanked Dr Thomas Latta for: “.....the intrepidity, scientific zeal and assiduity he has displayed.” in response to Dr Latta’s letter reporting on his treatment by intravenous saline infusion of moribund patients in the final stages of cholera. He had brought the virtually dead back to life.

A sense of excitement and hope filled the editorial—not just because of the scientific perceptiveness which underlay the treatment nor the technical competence with which Dr Latta carried it out, but for the courage he showed in undertaking it afresh. He was an extra-ordinary and admirable man.

Thomas was born in the last decade of the eighteenth century in Jessfield House in Newhaven. From his house he could look out over the Forth and run down the Whale Brae into the village and the society of the fisherfolk.

He was the fourth of five sons sired by Alexander Latta, a Leith merchant, who died in 1807. Alexander was an elder of the Kirkgate Church, a dissenting Presbyterian congregation, so births and deaths were not systematically recorded about the family. Therefore we do not know Thomas’ date of birth nor of his mother’s death though we know she predeceased her husband. Nevertheless we can presume that Thomas spent the formative years of his childhood in Newhaven.

After his father died, he lived with his elder brother—also Alexander and a medical student in Edinburgh at the time. When his brother set up in practice in Perth, Thomas moved with him, returning to Edinburgh in 1815 when he himself became a medical student.

As a young man he was adventurous. When a medical student he had gone on an expedition in 1818 to Spitzbergen as a surgeon companion to Captain William Scoresby, a contemporary expert in exploration of Arctic regions. Evidently he was considered competent enough to work as a doctor on his own before graduating M.D. in 1819.

Certainly he was physically able, scientifically observant and curious and went on exploratory and specimen gathering expeditions on the island. His experience there was put to good use, drawing on it both to illuminate aspects of his M.D thesis “On Scurvy” and to demonstrate his capacity to draw his own conclusions. His recommendations on the treatment of scurvy show particular consideration for the welfare of seafarers.

The epidemic of cholera was advancing inexorably west from Asia. Leith, a major port trading with Eastern Europe, was well prepared. Specific cholera hospitals were set up and the general public persuaded to use them as the only places to nurse cholera cases.

Local doctors were organised to provide supervision and care, working one week in four on continuous call night and day. Thomas Latta was one of them. Confronted with the epidemic, Latta and his colleagues were trying to understand the nature of the disease and how it should be treated in the light of the prevailing medical wisdom of the time. They agreed that loss of water and salts was the major problem but could see that replacing them by ingestion or through enemas did not work for the worst afflicted.

Dr William O’Shaughnessy suggested that intravenous injection of the normal salts of the blood might be beneficial. Latta had the skill and bravery to act on that suggestion for the first time ever as a treatment of last resort with patients at death’s door often with miraculous results.

In Latta’s hands it enabled recovery of a third of patients who formerly would have been mortally afflicted. Those who died either had demonstrably serious concurrent pathology (the doctors did their own post-mortems) or, on his own admission, were treated too late.

Within a year the cholera epidemic was already in decline and the need for this skilled and daring intervention was similarly diminishing. Intravenous fluid replacement fell out of fashion for nearly fifty years. Medicine complacently turned its back on the door to enlightenment that Dr Latta had thrown open by his brilliant example of the application of science to medicine.

In just over a year after the introduction of his revolutionary treatment Thomas Latta was dead. He died on the October 19, 1833 from consumption. Given the demands of his clinical work and the burden of disease among the people he cared for this was no surprise.

However, there is an immense debt of gratitude owed to Thomas Latta by patients who have benefited from this treatment ever since.