Purser, Francis (‘Frank’) Carmichael (1876–1934), neurologist, was born 16 September 1876 in India, son of William Edward Purser (b. 1845), official in the Indian civil service, and Elizabeth Purser (née Geoghegan), his cousin. After the death of his mother (1877), he was sent to live with his aunt in Galway and was educated at Galway Grammar School, where his uncle Dr Biggs was headmaster. He entered TCD and graduated BA (1898), MB (1899), and MD (1901) (Dubl.), and was admitted licentiate (1902) and elected member (1903) and fellow (1904) of the RCPI.
He was appointed pathologist to Dr Steevens' Hospital (1900–02) and assistant physician (1902–19) and subsequently senior physician (1919–34) to the Richmond, Whitworth, and Hardwicke Hospitals, and served as physician (1913–19) to Mercer's Hospital. He practised as a general physician but developed an interest in neurology, which he studied in London and Berlin, and subsequently became the leading neurologist in Dublin and established a large consulting practice. During the first world war, he held the rank of major in the RAMC, served as consulting neurologist to the forces in Ireland, and was awarded an OBE (1919).
Appointed professor of medicine (1917–26) at the RCSI, he moved to TCD when an hon. professorship in neurology was created for him (1926–34). Arguing that the medical syllabus was sufficiently comprehensive, he refrained from giving additional lectures in neurology, and in 1934, somewhat unwillingly, became king's professor of the practice of medicine. He translated Alfred Kast's Atlas of pathological anatomy [1910] from the German, was co-author with William Boxwell (qv) of the textbook An introduction to the practice of medicine (1924), and published articles in medical journals. Despite his dislike of publicity and his inhibitions about accepting public office – ‘modest beyond understanding, sensitive and shy’, according to Boxwell (Ir. Jn. Med. Sc., 135) – he was elected president of the RCPI (1933–4), of the Irish Medical Association, and of the Dublin University Biological Association (1906). Fellow and subsequently president of the Section of Medicine of the Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland, he was a member of the British Medical Association and vice-president of the Section of Neurology at its Dublin meeting.
In his youth he played rugby for TCD and was capped three times for Ireland (1898). A man of wide interests, he loved the outdoors, was a keen hill walker, and bought a farmstead at Calary, Co. Wicklow, where he carried out a programme of reafforestation, planting a great variety of trees. He was the nephew of two TCD dons, John Mallet Purser (qv) and Louis Claude Purser (qv), and of the artist Sarah Purser (qv). He and his family were members of the Moravian church and lived at 32 Fitzwilliam Place, Dublin, where he died suddenly on 28 February 1934 of a heart attack, and was buried in Calary.
He married (1903) the granddaughter of William Smith O'Brien (qv), Lucy Mabel O'Brien (b. 1873), who supported the movement for women's suffrage and was imprisoned (1913); they had one son, Sean Purser, who taught English literature at Glasgow University, and three daughters, two of whom graduated in medicine.