James Scott Robson was born in Hawick on 19 May 1921, the son of William Scott Robson and Elizabeth Hannah Watt. He was educated at Hawick High School and began studies at Edinburgh University in 1939 graduating in 1944 with the degree of MD., and then in 1945 with the degrees of MB ChB. Earlier, in 1942, he had been awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Studentship and travelled to the USA to complete his medical training.

From 1945 to 1948 Robson served as a Captain with the Royal Army Medical Corps in India, Palestine and Egypt, and then in 1948 he married Mary Kynoch Macdonald. On demobilisation from military service he worked for a brief period with Edinburgh Royal Infirmary Clinical Chemistry Laboratories teaching medical students and postgraduate doctors, and researching kidney function and looking at patients with disturbances of water and electrolyte balance. In 1949 however, he was awarded a Rockefeller Travelling Fellowship and he again travelled to the USA to the Department of Nutrition and Biochemistry, Harvard.

In 1950 he was back in Edinburgh and with Hugh Dudley (born 1925) he set up a treatment centre for acute reversible renal failure, and with his wife, the pathologist Dr. Mary MacDonald, the Edinburgh renal biopsy service was established. This groundwork led to the first successful kidney transplant operation in the UK, performed in 1960 by Professor Sir Michael Woodruff at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.

Robson became Reader in Therapeutics at Edinburgh University in 1961, Reader in Medicine in 1969, and Professor of Medicine in 1977. He played a prominent role in the revision and modernisation of the Edinburgh University undergraduate medical curriculum.

The nephrologist James Scott Robson, Emeritus Professor of Medicine, died in Edinburgh on 14 March 2010