A WEEKLY ILLUSTRATED JOURNAL OF SCIENCE. 



" To the solid ground 

 Of Nature trusts the mind which builds for aye." — Wordsworth. 



THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 1919- 



AN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PHYSICIAN. 

 Dr. John Fothergill and his Friends: Chapters in 

 Eighteenth-century Life. By Dr. R. Kingston 

 Fox. Pp. xxiv + 434. (London: Macmillan 

 and Co., Ltd., 1919.) Price 21s. net. 



MORE than any other period, the eighteenth 

 century is rich in memoirs and biographical 

 history, and , from these sources have been obtained 

 most of our facts regarding the mode of life, the 

 characters, and the mental activities of those who 

 were representative of that age. But estimates 

 of the lives and work of physicians have not 

 appeared so frequently, although many medical 

 men in the eighteenth century influenced the 

 social life of their period profoundly enough to 

 merit a biographical memoir. 



The life of Dr. John Fothergill is a case 

 in point, and the book under rexiew is a 

 valuable contribution to the biographical his- 

 tory of medicine. Fothergill is fully worthy of 

 the care Dr. Fox has bestowed upon his history, 

 for, in a sense, he was representative of his age 

 and orofession. He occupied a respectable, if 

 not a commanding, position in medicine; he was 

 ever ready ,to promote with his purse and influ- 

 ence the claims of science, and in an age when 

 few paid attention to public health and education 

 fie was an .energetic and enlightened reformer. 

 Others, notably Lettsom, have essayed the 

 portrait of Fothergill, but we do not remember 

 any memoir in which the character ,of the great 

 Quaker physician is depicted with more accuracy 

 and skill. 



The life of Fothergill may be considered from 

 the point of view of the phvsician, the man of 

 science, and the philanthropist. In all he played 

 a .considerable part, but his precise position as a 

 physician is difficult to describe. He was, it is 

 true, very successful in private practice, and 

 NO. 2601, VOL. 104] 



enjoyed an unusually large share of public pat- 

 ronage. From accounts that have been handed 

 down, he appears to have been a shrewd and 

 accurate observer of the clinical phenomena of 

 disease. But to judge .from the scanty and hastily 

 composed medical writings left by Fothergill, he 

 does not appear to have been a sagacious scien- 

 tific thinker, nor has he contributed much to the 

 advance of medicine. He was content to cling 

 to the traditions of the old clinician, and was 

 uninfluenced by the .advances that were being 

 made in the study of morbid anatomy as an aid 

 to the diagnosis and treatment of disease. As a 

 physician he belongs to the class of which Richard 

 Warren, Henry Revell Reynolds, and Sir Henry 

 Halford were leaders, but he cannot be assigned 

 a place among the great men who advanced medi- 

 cine, such as Matthew Baillie, William Prout, and 

 Richard Bright. 



Fothergill's position in science was not unlike 

 that of Sir Joseph Banks, whose influence, more 

 than actual scientific work performed, produced a 

 salutary effect on British science ,in the eighteenth 

 century. Botany interested him keenly, and nearly 

 all the time he could snatch from his medical 

 commitments was devoted to the cultivation of 

 his famous garden of thirty acres at Upton Park, 

 where fifteen gardeners were continually em- 

 ployed. Fothergill's estate at Upton Park was 

 no mere pleasure garden devisjd for the purpose 

 of social entertainment, but a nursery for the 

 rearing of shrubs and plants brought from all 

 parts of the world by collectors in Fothergill's 

 pay. In this way he was responsible for the intro- 

 duction of many varieties which can be seen in 

 anv garden at the present day. 



Besides medicine and botany, Dr. Fox gives a 

 full account of Fothergill's work in education and 

 jxjlitics, and his position as a leader of the Society 

 of Friends is dealt with in a temperate .and able 

 manner. The book is trustworthy, and should 

 commend itself to those who are interested jin 

 the intellectual progress of the eighteenth century. 



