text: Adair Crawford was born in Crumlin, Belfast, the son of Rev Thomas Crawford. He studied medicine at Glasgow and Edinburgh universities. He qualified MA in 1770 and then worked at St Georges Hospital in London before qualifying MD in 1780. He was Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, London, and physician at St Thomas Hospital, London. He died at Lymington in Hampshire.
  It is no coincidence that the titles of his publications usually begin with the word experiments. Crawford let the details of his experiments and their plain results do the talking, and generally refrained from theorising and over-interpretation. He did maintain the later-discredited phlogiston hypothesis, but wasn't doctrinaire about it.
  In 1785, Crawford was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia and the following year, in 1786, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. In 1787 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers were John Playfair, James Hutton, and James Gregory.
  He  died in Lymington in Hampshire on 29 July 1795.