The fame and notoriety of Dr. John Huxham.

JOHN HUXHAM, M.D., F.R.S., F.R.C.P. Edinburgh (c. 1692-1768), was an English physician whose practice was confined to Plymouth but whose writings were read throughout Europe. His literary career started with his Observationes de aere et morbis epidemicis (1739), in which meteorological records made at Plymouth from 1728 to 1737 were collated month by month with the diseases observed there. Further volumes followed the same plan from 1738 to 1748, and from 1748 to 1752. In these works there is a now conspicuous contrast between the meteorological records, which are elaborately quantified according to a scheme laid down by James Jurin, F.R.S., in 1723, and the notes on morbidity and mortality, which are superficial and sometimes reduced to names of prevalent diseases. To do justice to the extensive medical knowledge which he acquired in compiling these observations, Huxham therefore published separate treatises on the Devonshire colic, on diphtheria, on smallpox, and his best-known work, An essay on fevers (1750), which was translated into Latin, French, and Italian. Here Huxham discussed the conditions under which fevers appeared, the different types of fevers, and the remedies which, according to his reasoning, should tend to cure them. Hippocrates, "the best and oldest master of our profession"',' is. the presiding genius of the work, but Sydenham and Huxham's teacher Boerhaave are also drawn on, and Huxham's own cases are introduced at intervals.2 Huxham's writings must have been received with great interest, for they were published in London, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Bremen, Munich, Paris, Venice, Naples, and Lisbon. A collected edition was published at Leipzig within the author's own lifetime, and two other editions of his collected works were published after his death. To the well-read European physician of the later eighteenth century, therefore, Huxham, though only a name, was a name regarded with the deepest respect. "Is there anyone", a Leipzig professor of medicine asked in 1764, "who has so much as