Richard Morton (1637-1698).

RICHARD MORTON, the first physician since Galen to envisage a concept of the unity of tuberculosis and the first physician ever to state that tubercles are always present in its pulmonary form, was born in the county of Suffolk and baptised on 30 July 1637 in the parish of Ribbesford, Worcestershire, where his father, Robert Morton, was minister of Bewdley Chapel from 1635 to 1646. Richard Morton matriculated from Magdalen Hall, Oxford, but moved to New College when Magdalen Hall was absorbed by Magdalen College. He graduated Bachelor of Arts on 30 January 1656, and Master of Arts on 8 July 1659. During the interval he was Chaplain to New College and must have had the opportunity of meeting Sydenham, who held his Fellowship of All Souls until some time around 1661. Shortly afterwards he became Chaplain to the family of Philip Foley of Prestwood, and vicar of the parish of Kinver in Worcestershire. Philip Foley was his cousin, the fourth son of Thomas Foley, ironmaster at Stourbridge, and at various times between 1673 and 1701 Member of Parliament for Bewdley, Stafford and Droitwich. The founder of the family, which Munk describes as 'old and highly respectable', was Richard Foley, a seller of nails, and later a forgemaster, who had settled in Stourbridge in 1627, when he bought the manor of Bedcote from John Sparry. According to Scrivenor's History of the Iron Trade (1841) he had built his splitting mills on drawings of the ironfoundries in Sweden, to which he had gained entrance on the pretence that he was entertaining the workers on his fiddle. The Foley family had such influence in Whig Parliamentary circles during the reign of William and Mary that Sir Edward Harley welcomed the engagement of his son Robert, later first Earl of Oxford, to Philip's niece, Elizabeth. The parish registers of Kinver of between 1659 and 1662 show a distinct handwriting which is certainly Morton's. We know he had left the parish before 1662, evicted as a non-conformist unable to give his 'unfeigned consent and assent' to everything in Laud's Prayer Book, for in the Visitation Book of that month (B/V/1/67) his name is crossed out and 'vacat' is written against the living. In the parish he left a group of dissenters; in the Visitation Book of May, 1663 (B/V/1/71), we read that the churchwarden, Richard Bird, was presented 'for not presenting the names of those as sitt with their hatts on in tyme ofdivine service and sermon, and such as keepe conventicles in Vicaridge House, which is out of repaire, but no minister'. Morton did not forget his parisb; in his will he left £50 to its industrious poor. On 20 December 1670, he was created doctor of medicine at Oxford on the nomination of William, Prince of Orange, and according to Munk settled in practice in Grey-Friars Court, Newgate Street, in the City of London. He was admitted a candidate of the College of Physicians on 20 March 1676, and elected a Fellow on