Robert Coltman was an American doctor, born in 1862. He went to China in the mid-1880s, and in 1896 he was appointed professor of anatomy at the Tung Wen College in Peking. Two years later, he was appointed professor of surgery at the Imperial University in Peking, and become the personal physician to the Chinese royal household. He was also a freelance journalist, writing for the Chicago Record. After the Boxer Rebellion had been suppressed, he stayed on in China for another 25 years, becoming an attorney for the Standard Oil Company in the port city of Tientsin to the east of Peking. He retired in 1925, returned to the United States and died in 1931.