152 THE RISE OF MEDICAL SOCIETIES CHAP. 



stances of their origin ; they did their work for some years 

 and then lapsed. But one general medical society dating 

 from this epoch assumed a permanent form and has come 

 down to our own day the Medical Society of London, founded 

 by Lettsom in 1773. 



Dr. Lettsom was at this time twenty-eight years of age. 

 His debut on the medical stage in London under the wing of 

 Fothergill had been highly successful ; his talents and his 

 uncommon power of work promised him a high career, whilst 

 an experience of life and travel large for his years, with great 

 readiness of speech and of wit, had given him a wide circle of 

 acquaintance. He had begun life as the scientific physician, 

 and he was elected F.R.S. in this year. 



Purposing to form a medical society, Lettsom determined 

 that it should stand on a broader foundation than the small 

 societies of which he was a member. It should be a society 

 of medical practitioners of various ranks, who would, so he 

 phrased it, frequently meet together to compare their observa- 

 tions and mutually communicate their thoughts, taking note 

 of new discoveries at home and abroad. Selected medical 

 papers should be published, rewards given for improvements 

 in medicine, and a library established. He gathered around 

 him a number of other young men, especially apothecaries, 

 such as Charles Combe, the accomplished numismatist and 

 friend of W. Hunter, William Atkinson, and Timothy Lane ; 

 and of surgeons, William French, Joseph Shaw, George Vaux, 

 and others. Dr. Gilbert Thompson and Joseph Hooper, a 

 surgeon, were, like Lettsom, members of the Friends. Dr. 

 Nathaniel Hulme seems to have been Lettsom' s chief coadjutor. 

 Hulme was twelve years his senior, a Yorkshireman with an 

 Edinburgh degree, who had been in the navy. He practised 

 long in Charterhouse Square, being the first physician to the 

 General Dispensary, and on the staff of the City of London 

 Lying-in Hospital. Hulme was an amiable and honourable 

 man of learning and scientific taste ; he experimented on the 

 emission of light by certain bodies, and was elected F.R.S. in 

 1794 ; and he was awarded a gold medal by the Medical 

 Society of Paris for his work on sclerosis of the cellular tissue 

 in the new-born. He died in I8O7. 1 



country, e.g. at Warrington in 1770 (Mem. Cullen, i. 635), Colchester (1774), 

 Bristol, and Aberdeen (Mem. Lettsom, i. 99, 100, 118). A little group of men 

 Jenner, Parry of Bath, and others met at Rodborough, Gloucestershire ; see 

 C. H. Parry, Syncope A nginosa, 1799. There were medical societies in several 

 centres on the United States sea-board before the eighteenth century closed. 

 1 Clutterbuck in Trans. Med. Soc. Lond., 1810, p. 228 ; E. Owen, Idem, 

 xx. 309 ; Diet. Nat. Biog. ; Munk, Roll ; Lettsom, Hints, iii. 185, 190. 



