Mark Akenside (November 9, 1721 – June 23, 1770), was an English poet and physician.

Akenside was born at Newcastle upon Tyne, the son of a butcher; he was slightly lame all his life from a wound he received as a child from his father's cleaver. All his relations were dissenters, and, after attending the free school of Newcastle, and a dissenting academy in the town, he was sent (1739) to Edinburgh to study theology with a view to becoming a minister, his expenses being paid from a special fund set aside by the dissenting community for the education of their pastors. He had already contributed The Virtuoso, in imitation of Spenser's style and stanza (1737) to the Gentleman's Magazine, and in 1738 A British Philippic, occasioned by the Insults of the Spaniards, and the present Preparations for War (also published separately).

After one winter as a theology student, he changed to medicine. He repaid the money that had been advanced for his theological studies, and became a deist. His politics, said Dr. Samuel Johnson, were characterized by an "impetuous eagerness to subvert and confound, with very little care what shall be established," and he is caricatured in the republican doctor of Tobias Smollett's Peregrine Pickle. He was elected a member of the Medical Society of Edinburgh in 1740. His ambitions already lay outside his profession, and his gifts as a speaker made him hope one day to enter parliament. In 1740 he printed his "Ode on the Winter Solstice" in a small volume of poems. In 1741 he left Edinburgh for Newcastle and began to call himself surgeon, though it is doubtful whether he practised, and from the next year dates his life-long friendship with Jeremiah Dyson (1722-1776).

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