Sir William Paddy , M.D. (1554-1634).

INTRODUCTION JOHN AuBREY described Sir William Paddy, M.D. as 'an incomparable person', and 'one of the first learned men who made a physician's practice his study'.' Paddy's medical leadership influenced the professional development and legal responsibilities of contemporary English physicians, and his literary interests exemplified the qualities and difficulties around him during the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Carolinian periods of British history. Few facts surround his early life in London. His parents, Roger and Margery Paddy, had commercial and coastal freight-shipping interests, which provided ample financial support to William and his younger brother, Nicholas.2 William attended Merchant Taylors' School from 15 January 1568 to 1570. Among his friends were Lancelot Andrewes, Giles Tomson, and Thomas Dove, who later became the Bishops of Winchester, Gloucester, and Peterborough, respectively, and who translated parts of the King James I version (1611) of the Bible. Edmund Spenser, a poor 'free journeyman's son' who later became England's poet laureate, also went to Merchant Taylors' during this time. Paddy then entered St. John's College, Oxford, as a commoner in 1571. Here he earned the B.A. degree on 7 July 1573. He studied and practised medicine in the University of Leyden during the next sixteen years, and returned to England after receiving the M.D. degree on 21 July 1589w (fig. 1). After examination by the College of Physicians on 23 December 1589 for a permit to practise within London's city limits, he had yet to be incorporated as an M.D. at Oxford University. Between the two dates of his double incorporations at Oxford on 22 October 1591 and 11 July 1600, several events marked Paddy's initial advancement within London's medical circles. He became a 'desector of the Anathomies' in the Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons from 1596-1609,4 yet received a fine in 1598 for dissecting a cadaver in the Barber-Surgeons' Hall without its president's permission. He spent an increasing amount of time as a member of the College of Physicians, beginning as Licentiate (9 May 1590), advancing to Fellow (25 September 1591), being elected Censor (1595, 1597-1600), and later becoming President during 1609-11, and 1618. Paddy relied on the written records of ancient medical and philosophical authority, and as a Galenist, he opposed the study of nature and chemical experimentation-