William Wright

William Wright was one of the original twenty-one Fellows of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh when it was incorporated by royal charter on 29 November 1681. His name was written eighteenth on the charter. Wright undertook a short period of service in the naval medical service, followed by seventeen years in the army in the West Indies. He later practised privately in Jamaica. Wright was a native of Crieff.

Legacy of Slavery

Wright treated and owned enslaved people. The UCL slave ownership database indicates that at abolition, Wright received compensation for the loss of 33 enslaved people that he either owned directly or in partnership with others. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 'During these years [1764-1777] he became financially successful by investing the income from his medical practice in slaves and land. In mid-1765 he and Thomas Steel owned four slaves, in 1767 fifteen slaves, by 1771 thirty-three slaves’. Wright’s memoirs were amongst those publications which encouraged racial stereotypes and argued for a medical, and biological, basis to such racism.