John Arbuthnot, M.D. (1658-1735), physician to Queen Anne, was a man of extensive learning and of great scientific abilities, characterized by Thackeray as “one of the wisest, wittiest, most accomplished, gentlest of mankind.”
Daniel Turner, M.D. (1667-1741), achieved a certain fame as the inventor of an excellent ointment, still known as “Turner’s Cerate,” composed of oil, wax, and calamine.
Richard Mead, M.D. (1673-1754), was the author of the Mechanical Account of Poisons, a work which at once established his reputation. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1703. On the accession of George II. he was appointed physician-in-ordinary to the King. He was the friend of Radcliffe, and like him a generous promoter of science and learning and of unbounded charity to those in misery. It was Mead who persuaded Guy to bequeath his fortune to found the noble hospital which bears his name. Mead was a political physician, and it is said by Miss Strickland that his prompt boldness occasioned the peaceable proclamation of George I. Mead’s work on the diseases of the Bible, entitled Medica Sacra, is a curious and interesting treatise. Excellent physician as he was, he recommended pepper and lichen as a specific against the bite of a mad dog.
John Freind, M.D. (1675-1728), a learned and accomplished physician, is famous as the author of an elaborate work, The History of Physick from the Time of Galen to the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century. He laid the plan of this important work whilst a prisoner in the Tower, to which he was committed on suspicion of participation in the so-called “Bishop’s plot.” He was liberated after about three months’ confinement by the firmness of Dr. Mead, who refused to prescribe for Sir Robert Walpole till he consented to admit him to bail.[1008] During his imprisonment Freind wrote a Latin letter On certain Kinds of Small Pox.
How near the physicians of Mead’s time came towards the discovery of the germ theory of infectious disorders may be seen from his account of the leprosy.[1009] In this treatise he says it has been found by experiments that in the plague and other malignant eruptive fevers the infection once received into articles of clothing remains in them for a long time, and thence passes into human bodies, and “like seeds sown produces the disease peculiar to them.” With reference to the retention of the infection by dry walls, he says, “I thought it probable that they may, by a kind of fermentation, produce these hollow, greenish, or reddish strokes,” etc.
Surgeons.
Dominique Anel (1679-1730) was the famous French surgeon who invented the operation for aneurism, which Hunter afterwards modified and called by his own name.
He successfully treated lachrymal fistula, and invented several surgical instruments which are named after him.
J. L. Petit (1674-1750) in 1718 invented the screw tourniquet for compressing bleeding arteries. He was one of the most famous surgeons in the brightest period of the art in France, and was besides an excellent ophthalmologist.
Le Cat (1700-1768) was the famous lithotomist, and opponent of the doctrines of Haller.