John Boswell was born in Auchinleck, Ayrshire, and studied medicine at the University of Leiden, where he was the last British student to be promoted by Herman Boerhaave. He received his MD from Leiden in 1736 and was elected President of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in 1770. Boswell was the uncle of the biographer James Boswell, who described him as 'an elegant scholar and a physician bred in the school of Boerhaave'. He died in Edinburgh on 15 May 1780.
