Born at Magdalena, Argentina on 15 September 1865, the fourth child and third son of Henry Thompson, an estanciero (manager of a country estate), and Margaret Cowen, his wife. He was educated privately at Liverpool and in Paris, and took his medical training at Edinburgh University, where he graduated with honours in medicine and surgery in 1890. He also studied at the London Hospital where he afterwards served as ophthalmic assistant, and was chief clinical assistant to William Lang at Moorfields (the Royal London Ophthalmic Hospital) from 1898 to 1905. He took the Conjoint qualification in 1900, and the Fellowship the next year. After a period as surgeon in charge of the Eye, Throat, and Ear Hospital, Shrewsbury, he settled in practice in London. He was elected assistant surgeon to the Western Ophthalmic Hospital, becoming in due course surgeon to it, and was also ophthalmic surgeon to the French Hospital and to the Hospital for Epilepsy and Paralysis, Maida Vale. He contributed a number of papers to the *Transactions of the Ophthalmological Society*. Thompson married in 1893 Mary Cullen, who died in 1933. He died very suddenly in Argentina on 13 September 1947, two days before his eighty-second birthday. He was survived by two sons and a daughter.