John Crane (1571--1652); the Cambridge apothecary and philanthropist.

JOHN CRANE lived in Cambridge for most of his life and died there, a wealthy man, on 26 May 1652 at the age of eighty-one. His name has been kept alive to the present day in Cambridge University by his Charity for paying the medical expenses of poor, sick scholars. The towns of Wisbech, Cambridge, King's Lynn, and Ipswich also received benefactions in his will for setting up young men in business, but his name has long been forgotten in them except perhaps in Wisbech where he was born and his charities became merged with others in municipal charitable funds after 1859. Although Crane was a prominent citizen of Cambridge, High Sheriff of Cambridgeshire in 1641, and a well-known apothecary, very little direct information survives about him. His memory rests upon his posthumous benefactions rather than upon records or recollections of his personality and work. The main source of information about him, his relatives, and friends is his will of 21 June 1651 and two codicils of 20 September 1651 and 21 April 1652.1 The document is very long and detailed, being full of explanations, precautions, and safeguards to ensure strict compliance with his wishes. It richly deserves the exasperated note written on the copy in the Cambridge University library: "The most complicated, absurd and impracticable of all wills that ever came under the eye of S. Peck. Trin. Coll. 1788". The writer, the Reverend Samuel Peck, a Fellow of Trinity College, had managed the business of Crane's Charity for the University from 1786 to 1790. Nevertheless, the numerous bequests to relatives and friends do enable the construction of a tentative pedigree (Fig. 1) and give some idea of Crane's social circle. Even so, there is a dearth of basic biographical details about him.