Born in Edinburgh on 27 November 1870, the third child and second son of Alexander Dick, grain merchant of Leith, and Catherine Lawson, his wife. He was educated at Stewarts College and the University of Edinburgh, where he graduated MB CM winning the university medals in midwifery and gynaecology, pathology and physiology. He was also medallist in midwifery and gynaecology of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. He served as house surgeon in the gynaecological wards at the Royal Infirmary and was also university demonstrator of pathology. In 1892 he won a Buchanan scholarship and completed his training at St Bartholomew's, taking the English Conjoint degree in 1894 proceeding to the English Fellowship in 1896. After serving as house surgeon at the Hospital for Women and Children, Manchester, and for a short time as assistant medical officer at the Lancashire County Asylum Rainhill, and senior house surgeon at the Stanley Hospital, Liverpool Dick went out to South Africa where he settled in practice at Cradock and was appointed to the Queen's Central Hospital. During the war served as surgeon-captain attached to the colonial forces, and won the Queen's medal. While the surrounding country was disaffected, Dick was granted one of the only permits to leave the town of Cradock by day or night, so that he might visit his country patients, many of whom were Boers, to within a radius of forty miles; he was never attacked on any of his journeys. After the war he served a term of office as deputy mayor of Cradock. Returning to Britain, Dick took the Edinburgh MD in 1906 and practised from 1908 at Rossendale, 89 Cazenove Road, Stamford Hill, London, N, in partnership with J W Hunt, MD, MRCS 1876, and J M Laughton, MB Edinburgh. He served during the war of 1914-18 as civil surgeon at the City of London military hospital. He then entered the administrative department of the commission for medical services of the Ministry of Pensions, and became president of medical boards for the County of London. Dick became deeply interested in problems of social medicine, particularly in their relation to children. He made a particular study of rickets as it affected the young "of all animals kept in captivity". He published a paper, "The teeth in rickets" in the *Proc Roy Soc Med*. 1916, 9, children's diseases, p 83, and in 1919 a book on *Defective housing and the growth of children*. But his views were most effectively published in his Rickets - a study of economic conditions and their effects on the health of the nation, 1922. His ideas were controversial, for he disbelieved in vitamin deficiency, and debated keenly in favour of his own teaching of the economic causes of rickets and dental caries, and the best ways and means of defeating these plagues. Dick married in 1911 Norah Winifred Duke, who survived him with a son and two daughters. Mrs Dick wrote and broadcast on medical subjects under the pseudonyms of Winifred Lawson and "A doctor's wife". While working in London, Lawson Dick lived at 42 Cholmely Park, Highgate. He retired to The Gables, Chichester Road, Dorking, where he died on 13 June 1944, aged 73.