John Glaister was a Glasgow University medical graduate. University of Glasgow Professor of Forensic Medicine and Public Health. He was a prestigious forensic scientist and author of Medical Jurisprudence still considered a standard textbook for today's scientists. Glaister had a high public profile due to his regular (and often dramatic) appearances in court as an expert witness. So much so that the novelist and lawyer Erle Stanley Gardner, author of the popular Perry Mason books , dedicated one of his novels ('The Case of the Horrified Heirs') to him.

Two John Glaisters, father and then son, between them, occupied the regius chair of forensic medicine at Glasgow University for over sixty years between 1899 and 1962.