Born at Holbeach, Lincolnshire, 11 April 1845 and was educated at the Holbeach Grammar School and afterwards at a private school in Cambridgeshire. He was apprenticed at the age of sixteen to Robert Harper, MRCS at Holbeach until he entered St Thomas's Hospital in 1864. Here he gained the first College prize in his first and second years and the Treasurer's gold medal. After acting as house surgeon he went to Bristol in December 1867 as assistant house surgeon to the General Hospital, and was house surgeon 1868-71. He then began to practise as a surgeon in Clifton, and was appointed surgeon to the Bristol Royal Hospital for Sick Children and Women. He only held the post for a few months as he was elected surgeon to the Bristol General Hospital. He resigned this post in 1893 on account of ill-health and was made consulting surgeon to the charity. In the Bristol Medical School he was successively demonstrator of anatomy (1872-8), lecturer on surgery (1878-93), professor of surgery in Bristol University College, and finally emeritus professor. He was also president of the Bath and Bristol branch of the British Medical Association, and chairman of the Bristol Nurses' Institution and Private Nursing Home. He was active in the establishment of the Bristol Medico-Chirurgical Society, and in the negotiations which ended in the foundation of the University College and the affiliation to it of the Bristol Medical School. Prolonged ill-health, commencing with blindness, led to Dobson's complete retirement from 1898 until his death in 1919. He was sustained in his affliction by his knowledge of Shakespeare, which had earlier made him president of the Clifton Shakespeare Society. His wife survived him with four sons, three of whom were in the army and one in the navy, and a daughter. The naval son was decorated DSO, and won the VC during the attack on Cronstadt in August 1918. Dobson died on 16 November 1919 at 16 College Road, Clifton, Bristol. Mrs Dobson died on 19 June 1932. Dobson was one of the surgeons who advanced the reputation of the Bristol Medical School, more especially in connexion with the surgery of the abdomen. He was amongst the first to suggest the direct suture of perforated gastric ulcer. Publications:- Various papers in the *Bristol Medico-Chirurgical Journal*.