S. S. Alison was an Edinburgh man, educated at the Royal High School and the University in Edinburgh, Paris, and King’s College, London. His first practice was at Tranent near Edinburgh, where he drew up reports on local sanitary conditions and on colliers’ diseases —the latter on Lord Ashley’s behalf. In 1841 he moved to London, where he obtained consulting appointments at the Northern Dispensary, the Scottish Hospital, and the Brompton Hospital. Diseases of the heart and lungs became his chief study. He invented a " differential stethoscope " and wrote a book on Physical Examination of the Chest in Pulmonary Consumption and its Intercurrent Diseases (1860).
G H Brown
[B.M.J., 1877; Medical Circular, 1852, iI, 4]