Richard Mead
Image by/from Mezzotint by R. Houston after A. Ramsay
Richard Mead (11 August 1673 – 16 Feb 1754) was an British physician. His work, A Brief Discourse concerning Pestilential Contagion, and also the Method for use to avoid it (1720), was of historic importance within the knowledge of transmissible illnesses.
The eleventh of 13 kids of Matthew Mead (1630-1699), a completely independent minister, Richard was created at Stepney, London. He studied at Utrecht for 3 years under JG Graevius. Getting made the decision to follow along with this sort of profession, then he visited Leiden and attended the lectures of Paul Hermann and Archibald Pitcairne. In 1695 he graduated in philosophy and physic at Padua, as well as in 1696 he came back to London, entering at the same time on the effective practice.
His Mechanical Account of Poisons made an appearance in 1702, and, in 1703, he was accepted towards the Royal Society, to whose Transactions he contributed for the reason that year a paper around the parasitic nature of scabies. Within the same year, he was elected physician to St. Thomas’ Hospital, and hired to see physiological lectures in the Surgeon’s Hall. Around the dying of John Radcliffe in 1714, Mead grew to become the recognised mind of his profession he attended Queen Anne on her behalf deathbed, as well as in 1727 was hired physician to George II, getting formerly offered him for the reason that capacity as he was prince of Wales.
Whilst in the service from the king, Mead got active in the development of a brand new charitable organization, the Foundling Hospital, both like a founding governor so that as an consultant on everything medical. The Foundling Hospital would be a home for abandoned children as opposed to a medical hospital, but it’s stated that through Dr. Mead’s participation, the Foundling was outfitted with an ill room along with a pharmacy. He’s even designed to have influenced the architect, Theodore Jacobsen, into incorporating a sizable courtyard to advertise the kids exercising. A complete-size portrait of Dr Mead, donated through the artist Allan Ramsay in 1747, helps to ensure that his contribution won’t be forgotten, and it is permanently displayed in the Foundling Museum.
Dr Richard Mead seemed to be another from the Royal Society along with a Freemason (although not recognized to which lodge he belonged).
Mead would be a collector of works of art, rare books, classical sculpture, gems and zoological examples, that they provided for attend the library in the Bloomsbury house. His collection contained 10,000 volumes. In 1752 he received instructions from Camillo Paderni, in regards to the progress in the excavations from the Rental property from the Papyri. After his dying, it required 56 days to auction these to book collectors from England and abroad. His “Genuine and whole Assortment of Valuable Gems, Bronzes, Marble along with other Busts and Antiquities” was auctioned by Abraham Langford at his house within the Great Piazza, Covent Garden on 11-15 March 1755.
Mead’s country estate what food was in Old Windsor in Berkshire, but he died at his house in Bloomsbury in 1754. His London home later created the foundation of effective Ormond Street Hospital.
Mead was hidden in Temple Church. A monument to him was put into its northern border aisle of Westminster Abbey, having a bust by Peter Scheemakers.
In 1755 was printed (posthumously) Mead’s Medica Sacra Or, A commentary around the most outstanding illnesses, pointed out within the Holy Scriptures. He utilized the job of his supposed relative Frederick Mede’s Doctrine of Demons as well as of his once patient Isaac Newton’s Chronology to reason that questionnable ideas regarding demons had joined Christianity. Like Arthur Ashley Sykes yet others, Mead understood individuals suffering from demons within the New Proof of refer only to individuals struggling with a number of illnesses:
Mead is satirised in Laurence Sterne’s novel, Tristram Shandy, where he briefly seems as Dr Kunastrokius: “—Did not Dr. Kunastrokius, exceptional man, at his leisure hrs, go ahead and take finest delight imaginable in combing of asses’ tails, and plucking the dead hairs by helping cover their his teeth, though he’d tweezers forever in his pocket?” The name Kunastrokius is clearly an intimate pun, possibly referencing Voltaire’s Cunegund of Candide (1759). Certainly one of Sterne’s correspondents later complained he was reviving prevalent rumours that Mead choose to go bankrupt because of having to pay for elaborate sexual favours. Sterne defended themself for the reason that he did was “most distantly hint in a droll foible in the character…known before by every chamber-maid and footman inside the bills of mortality”.
Aside from the Mechanical Account of Poisons (second erectile dysfunction, 1708), Mead printed:
