After a life of 80 years, he died full of honours, leaving his many literary labors as monuments of his talents and industry.
The reign of Queen Anne has been called the Augustan age of literature in England, and was in no less degree looked upon as the great day of medical science. Amongst the literary men we have to name Swift, Addison, Warburton, Pope, Steele, Parnell, Rowe, Gay, and others; and amongst Physicians—Freind, Mead, Radcliffe, Cheselden, Arbuthnot, Garth, &c. &c.
Radcliffe next comes under notice; he was a man cast in a rougher mould than Mead. John Radcliffe was born at Wakefield, in Yorkshire, in 1650, and educated at Oxford, where he became a Fellow of Lincoln College; after a two years residence he resigned his Fellowship and devoted himself to physic, removed to London, and settled in Bow-street, Covent Garden. He was a man of ready wit, and great conversational powers, with much pleasantry and frankness. In 1686 he was appointed physician to Princess Anne of Denmark, and after the revolution was often consulted by William the Third; the latter on his return from Holland sent for Radcliffe, and shewing him his ankles swollen, and his body emaciated, the doctor brusquely said, “Truly I would not have your Majesty’s two legs for your three kingdoms.” This sally lost him the king’s favour, nevertheless he still prospered, and sat in Parliament for the borough of Buckingham.
In the last illness of Queen Anne, Radcliffe was sent for, but excused his attendance on account of indisposition; the Queen died the next day, and Radcliffe was greatly censured, which is said to have hastened his own death, which took place three months after.
There is a story told of his quarrel with Sir Godfrey Kneller, the celebrated painter. They were next door neighbours, and enjoyed a certain garden in common. Kneller complained that Radcliffe took no care that the door leading into this garden should be kept properly shut, and sent a snappish message to the doctor, that if he were not more mindful he would shut up the door and keep the key. Radcliffe’s answer was, “Tell Sir Godfrey Kneller he may do what he likes with the door provided he does not paint it.” Kneller retorted to this sarcasm, “Tell the doctor I will take anything from him except his physic.”
I cannot find that Radcliffe ever published any work; but at his death he left the munificent sum of £40,000 to the University of Oxford for the formation of a public library of medical and philosophical science, and a further considerable sum to provide for an annual augmentation of books and instruments. Garth, in allusion to this bequest, remarked that for Radcliffe to found a library was as if an Eunuch should establish a Seraglio.
Samuel Garth was among the celebrities of this time: the correspondent of Bolingbroke, the friend of Swift and Addison, and the patron of Pope, he must have possessed great merit to have reached such a position. He was born of a good family in Yorkshire: the date of his birth I have been unable to discover, but he was admitted a Fellow of the College of Physicians in 1693. Johnson classes him with the English Poets, and in his description of him says, “He is always mentioned as a man of benevolence, and it is just to suppose that his desire to help the helpless disposed him with so much zeal to undertake the founding of a dispensary:—Whether physicians have, as Temple says, more learning than the other faculties I will not stay to inquire, but I believe every man has found in physicians great liberality and dignity of sentiment, very prompt effusion of benevolence, and willingness to exert a lucrative art, where there is no hope of lucre.”
Garth was an active and zealous Whig, and consequently familiarly known to all the great men of that party; his orthodoxy was questioned, but it was the fashion of the times to be a free thinker. Pope apostrophises him in his second pastoral:—
“Accept, O! Garth, the muses early lays,
That add this wreath of ivy to thy bays.”