264 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



was the first association of its kind in England, and the 

 precursor of the Royal Society. 1 That it was popular 

 among the students is attested by John Chamberlain, 2 who 

 lived with Gilbert and who speaks of " the town as empty 

 as if it were dead vacation, nobody at the Doctor's." 

 Later, when Gilbert was called to Whitehall, Chamberlain 

 predicts the disbanding of the society, saying U I doubt 

 our college will be dissolved and some of us sent to seeke 

 our fortune;" and still later, after Gilbert's departure, "the 

 covie is now dispersed," he chronicles somewhat ruefully, 

 "and we are driven to seeke our feeding further off, our 

 Doctor being alredy setled in Court." Meanwhile Gilbert 

 was elected to the office of Censor of the College three 

 times, twice to that of Treasurer, then he became, in 1597, 

 Consilarius in place of Dr. Giffard, and finally, in 1600, 

 the same year in which his famous work appeared, he 

 reached the Presidential Chair. 



In the last-named year also, as Chamberlain records, 

 Queen Elizabeth appointed him one of her body physi- 

 cians, a merely perfunctory office, for she detested doctors 

 and would have none of their drugs. Perhaps her un- 

 lucky experience with the Jew, Rodrigo Lopez, whom she 

 covertly favored and allowed to prescribe for her, until he 

 was detected trying to give her poison (being thereunto in- 

 cited, so it was said, by Spain) and duly convicted, shat- 

 tered her faith in the medical profession : perhaps, in her 

 last years, she believed in her own sarcastic remark that 

 the people would say that the physicians killed her if she 

 died of old age after following their counsels : perhaps she 



1 It is generally stated that the organization of the College of Philoso- 

 phy instituted in London in 1645, which immediately preceded the Royal 

 Society, was due to the scheme of Solomon's House described by Bacon 

 in the New Atlantis and first suggested in his Praise of Knowledge, pub- 

 lished in 1593. Gilbert's society, however, appears to be of still earlier 

 establishment. It may have been the first medical "quiz" class in 

 England. 



2 Letters written by John Chamberlain during the reign of Queen 

 Elizabeth. London, Camden Society, 1861, pp. 88, 102, 103. 



