John Arbuthnot
John Arbuthnot | |
---|---|
Born | 1667 (baptised on 29 April) Kincardineshire, Scotland |
Died | 27 February 1735 (aged 67) |
Nationality | Scottish |
Education | Marischal College, University of Aberdeen |
Occupation(s) | physician, satirist, polymath |
John Arbuthnot FRS (baptised 29 April 1667 – 27 February 1735), often known simply as Dr Arbuthnot, was a Scottish[1] physician, satirist and polymath in London. He is best remembered for his contributions to mathematics, his membership in the Scriblerus Club (where he inspired Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels book III and Alexander Pope's Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry, Memoirs of Martin Scriblerus, and possibly The Dunciad), and for inventing the figure of John Bull.
Biography
In his mid-life, Arbuthnot, complaining of the work of Edmund Curll, among others, who commissioned and invented a biography as soon as an author died, said, "Biography is one of the new terrors of death," and so a biography of Arbuthnot is made difficult by his own reluctance to leave records. Alexander Pope noted to Joseph Spence that Arbuthnot allowed his infant children to play with, and even burn, his writings. Throughout his professional life, Arbuthnot exhibited a strong humility and social conviviality, and his friends often complained that he did not take sufficient credit for his own work.
Arbuthnot was born in Arbuthnot, Kincardineshire, on the north-eastern coast of Scotland, son of Margaret (née Lammie) and Rev Alexander Arbuthnot, an Episcopalian priest. He may have graduated with an arts degree from Marischal College in 1685.[2] Where Arbuthnot's brothers took part in Jacobite causes in 1689, he remained with his father. These brothers included Robert, who fled after fighting for King James VII in 1689 and became a banker in Rouen and half-brother George, who fled to France and became a wine merchant. However, when William and Mary came to the throne and the Scottish and English parliaments required all ministers to swear allegiance to them as king and queen, Arbuthnot's father did not comply. As a non-juror, he was removed from his church, and John was there to take care of affairs when, in 1691, his father died.
Arbuthnot went to
He first wrote satire in 1697, when he answered Dr John Woodward's An essay towards a natural history of the earth and terrestrial bodies, especially minerals... with An Examination of Dr Woodward's Account &c. He poked fun at the arrogance of the work and Woodward's misguided, Aristotelian insistence that what is theoretically attractive must be actually true. In 1701, Arbuthnot wrote another mathematical work, An essay on the usefulness of mathematical learning, in a letter from a gentleman in the city to his friend in Oxford. The work was moderately successful, and Arbuthnot praises mathematics as a method of freeing the mind from superstition.
In 1702, he was at Epsom when Prince George of Denmark, husband of Queen Anne fell ill. According to tradition, Arbuthnot treated the prince successfully. According to tradition again, this treatment earned him an invitation to court. Also around 1702, he married Margaret, whose maiden name is possibly Wemyss. Although there are no baptismal records, it seems that his first son, George (named in honour of the prince), was born in 1703. He was elected to be a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1704. Also thanks to the Queen's presence, he was made an MD at Cambridge University on 16 April 1705.
Arbuthnot was an amiable individual, and Swift said that the only fault an enemy could lay upon him was a slight waddle in his walk. His conviviality and his royal connections made him an important figure in the Royal Society. In 1705, Arbuthnot became physician extraordinary to Queen Anne, and at the same time was put on the board trying to publish the Historia coelestius. Newton and
Although Arbuthnot was not a
Arbuthnot returned to mathematics in 1710 with An argument for Divine Providence, taken from the constant regularity observed in the births of both sexes (linked below) in the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions. In this paper, Arbuthnot examined birth records in London for each of the 82 years from 1629 to 1710 and the
As a Scriblerian
In 1710, Jonathan Swift moved to
In 1712, Arbuthnot and Swift both attempted to aid the Tory government of Harley and
In 1713, Arbuthnot continued his political satire with Proposals for printing a very curious discourse... a treatise of the art of political lying, with an abstract of the first volume. As with other works that Arbuthnot encouraged, this systemizes a
The club met for only a year, as Queen Anne died in July 1714, and the club met for the last time in November of that year. When Anne died, she had no will. Consequently, all her servants were left without positions and entirely at the mercy of the next administration – an administration that was chosen by the enemies of Arbuthnot and the other Scriblerans. When George I came to the throne, Arbuthnot lost all of his royal appointments and houses, but he still had a vigorous medical practice. He lived at "the second door from the left in Dover Street" in Piccadilly.
Life under the Hanoverians
In 1717, Arbuthnot contributed somewhat to Pope and Gay's play,
In 1719 he took part in a pamphlet war over the treatment of
In 1726 and 1727, Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope reunited at Arbuthnot's house during visits, and Swift showed Arbuthnot the manuscript of Gulliver's Travels ahead of time. The detailed parody of on-going Royal Society projects in book III of Gulliver's Travels likely came from "hints" from Arbuthnot. The visit also bore fruit in Pope's The Dunciad of 1729 (the second edition), where Arbuthnot probably wrote the "Virgilius restauratus" satirizing Richard Bentley.
Arbuthnot was guardian to Peter the Wild Boy on his first arrival in London.
In 1730, Arbuthnot's wife died. The next year, he produced a work of popular medicine, An essay concerning the nature of aliments, and the choice of them, according to the different constitutions of human bodies. The book was quite popular, and a second edition, with advice on diet, came out the next year. It had four more full editions and translations into French and German. In 1733 he wrote another very popular work of medicine called An Essay Concerning the Effects of Air on Human Bodies. As with the former work, it went through multiple editions and translations. He argued that the air itself had to have enormous effects on the personality and persons of humanity, and he believed that the air of locations resulted in the characteristics of the people, as well as particular maladies. He advised his readers to ventilate sickrooms and to seek fresh air in cities. Although the idea that airs carried sickness was incorrect, the practical upshot of Arbuthnot's advice was efficacious, as crowded, poorly sanitized Augustan era cities had bad air and infectious air.
His son Charles, studying to be a divine at Christ Church, Oxford, died in 1731, the same year that the Swift and Pope Miscellanies, Volume the Third (which was the first volume) appeared. He contributed "An Essay of the Learned Martinus Scriblerus Concerning the Origine of the Sciences" to the volume.
In 1734, his health began to decline. He had
Literary significance
Arbuthnot was one of the founding members of the
Because of Arbuthnot's own insistence on not being recognized, it is difficult to speak definitively of his literary significance. Samuel Johnson thought highly of him as Boswell noted: "Talking of the eminent writers in Queen Anne's reign, he observed ,'I think Dr. Arbuthnott the first man among them. He was the most universal genius, being an excellent physician, a man of deep learning, and a man of much humour.'"[7] Arbuthnot was at the heart of many of the greatest satires of his age. He was a conduit and source for a great many of the finest literary accomplishments for over half a century of writing, but Arbuthnot was zealous that he not receive credit.[original research?]
Bibliography
- George A. Aitken (1892). The Life and Works of John Arbuthnot. Clarendon Press. OCLC 353293.
john arbuthnot aitken works.
Arbuthnot's collected works, available on line. - Lester M. Beattie (1935). John Arbuthnot: Mathematician and Satirist. Harvard University Press. OCLC 2175311.
- D. R. Bellhouse (December 1989) [manuscript first published 1694]. "A manuscript on chance written by John Arbuthnot". International Statistical Review. 57 (3): 249–259. JSTOR 1403798.
Works
- John Arbuthnot (1710). "An argument for Divine Providence, taken from the constant regularity observed in the births of both sexes" (PDF). S2CID 186209819.
- John Arbuthnot (1712, published in 1727). The History of John Bull.
- John Arbuthnot (1722). Mr. Maitland’s account of inoculating the small-pox, London, printed for the author, by J. Downing. (Transcription in Eighteenth Century Collections Online).
- John Arbuthnot (1733). An essay concerning the effects of air on human bodies, London, printed for J. Tonson in the Strand. (Transcription in Eighteenth Century Collections Online).
- John Arbuthnot (1727). Tables of Ancient Coins, Weights and Measures. Explain'd and exemplify'd in several dissertations., London : printed for J. Tonson, 1727.
References
- ^ "John Arbuthnot | British mathematician and author". Britannica.
- ^ Nenadic, Stana. "Scots in London in the Eighteenth Century".
- ISBN 0-387-95329-9
- ^ Hald, Anders (1998), "Chapter 4. Chance or Design: Tests of Significance", A History of Mathematical Statistics from 1750 to 1930, Wiley, p. 65
- ISBN 0-471-16068-7
- ^ Rogers, The Alexander Pope Encyclopedia, p. 110; Baines, The Complete Critical Guide to Alexander Pope (Routledge, 2000), p. 37.
- ^ James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, London: Oxford University Press, 1966, Wed. 6th July 1763, p.301.
Sources
- Anderson, William, John Arbuthnot, M.D., in The Scottish Nation, Edinburgh, 1867, vol.1, pps:146-151.
- Ross, Angus, John Arbuthnot in Matthew, H.C.G., and Brian Harrison (eds.), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 2, 325–329. London: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Further reading
- Chambers, Robert; Thomson, Thomas Napier (1857). . A Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen. Vol. 1. Glasgow: Blackie and Son. pp. 68–73 – via Wikisource.
External links
- John Arbuthnot at the Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive (ECPA)
- Works by John Arbuthnot at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about John Arbuthnot at Internet Archive
- Works by John Arbuthnot at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
- Epitaph on Don Francisco (1732) at Wikisource
- Concerning Dr John Arbuthnot's images
- Arbuthnot family tree[usurped]
- Arbuthnot's actutor biography
- The Art of Political Lying
- Arbuthnot and Gullivers Travels