Dr. Butler revisited.

WILLIAM BuTLER, Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, was famous in his lifetime as a medical eccentric, whose practice could only with difficulty be classified under any school-theory. His papers, preserved in the Fellows' Library at Clare, confirm that he was humane and forthright, not tied to any philosophical system but with ideas pointing towards the testing of remedies by trials and of theories by experience. Such is the just verdict of Dr. Jeffrey Boss in his recent publication in this journal of seven of the Butler Mss.,1 but his implication that they are all that remains in them of medical interest is far from true. In this article I shall deal first with four other pieces from that collection, all in Latin, which throw light on Butler and contemporary medicine; and secondly offer some corrections and elucidations of the published documents, also thereby showing the range and character of Butler's learning.2