John Addenbrooke M.D. (1680-1719).

WHEN A PUBLIC benefactor is neither a well-known local or national figure nor the subject of contemporary writings, an eponymous benefaction may be his only memorial. Such is the case of John Addenbrooke, who founded the hospital at Cambridge which bears his name. He spent a third of his short life of thirty-nine years in residence at Catharine Hall (now St. Catharine's College) of which he became a Scholar, Fellow, Tutor, and Bursar but attracted no particular attention. After proceeding to the degree of M.D. in 1710, he left Cambridge to practise in London but, a few years later, ill health caused him to retire to Buntingford in Hertfordshire where he died in 1719. His intention to found a hospital in Cambridge for poor people was only disclosed by his will, and it did not open until Monday, 13 October 1766, some forty-seven years after his death and fifty-five years since he had left Cambridge. It is, therefore, scarcely surprising that contemporary information about him is scanty and, by the time that his hospital opened, few people in Cambridge would have known or remembered him. The year 1980, as the tercentenary of his birth, seemed an appropriate opportunity to research and eventually to publish what is known of him and of his education as a medical student at Cambridge during the years 1697 to 1706. Much of this is owed to the researches of A. W. Langford, which are embodied in a thesis for the degree of M.D. of Cambridge University in 1934 and also excerpted in the St. Catharine's Society magazine,' and to the memoirs of the Reverend William Stukeley,2 a contemporary medical student and friend of John Addenbrooke, and to those of the antiquary the Reverend William Cole, whose papers are in the British Library.3 John Addenbrooke was the only child of the Reverend Samuel Addenbrooke, Vicar of West Bromwich in Staffordshire, and his wife Matilda Porry of Wolverhampton. He was born at Kingswinford (Swinford Regis) in Staffordshire, as recorded on his tombstone in St. Catharine's College Chapel (Fig. 1). The exact date of his birth is