John Evelyn and medicine.

JOHN EvELYN has often been described as a virtuoso in the seventeenth-century meaning of that word, and if it be recalled that the Earl of Arundel, the greatest of the virtuosi was his patron, that Evelyn was a member of the Royal Society almost from its inception and a diligent attendant of its meetings, which at that time dealt with a wide variety of curiosa and technological as well as scientific problems, that he was a vocal and literary exponent and collector of the odd and the artistic, and a recognized authority on architecture and gardens, he must certainly be classed among the notable virtuosi of his day. But within his multifarious interests and their related activities Evelyn appears to have had a particular regard for medicine, one that transcended the usual concern of those members of his class who did not espouse that subject professionally. Except for somewhat intermittent studies at Oxford, undertaken more as an obligation than because of genuine desire, medicine was the only discipline in which he deliberately took any formal instruction, and throughout the many years covered by his Diary medicine and matters ancillary to it received uncommon attention." Anyone living in the seventeenth century was very much aware of accident, disease, and ever proximate death. It was quite in the order of things that Evelyn, born in 1620, recalled from his fifth year the severe plague in 1625, its high mortality and the fact, as he later wrote, that he himself 'was shortly after so dangerously sick of a Feavor, that (as I have heard), the Physitians despair'd of me' (ii.7).2 He was fourteen years old when his sister Elizabeth died (ii.12), fifteen at the death of his mother, whose four attending physicians were identified by name in the Diary (ii.14-15), and twenty at the time of his father's death (ii.26). Of Evelyn's five sons, four died in infancy and he outlived the fifth. Of three daughters, two died as young women, and only one outlived her father. This chronicle of sickness and high mortality was common enough at the time, but Evelyn appears to have differed from other contemporary diarists and chroniclers in the detail he devoted to the causes, actual or presumed, of sicknesses and their treatments, and more frequent identification of the attending physicians. In addition to such references, he seems to have known, often intimately, not only the leading members of the medical profession but as well many of those practising in the provinces. The one great exception was Thomas Sydenham who is never